This week, Tennessee became the 25th state to join a lawsuit against the president’s executive amnesty order. The lawsuit may work, but there’s another, more direct, and considerably more interesting redress against executive overreach. Proposed in 1798 by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In 1798, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were signed into law by President John Adams. The A&S Acts comprised four bills that increased the federal government’s power to shut up dissenters; most noxious was a provision that permitted the prosecution of anyone who said anything about the government that the government considered “seditious.” Fourteen of the dominant Federalist party’s political enemies were arrested and imprisoned. John Adams has — to date — been our only Federalist president. Prior to the presidential election of 1804, votes were cast only for president; each elector in the Electoral College cast two presidential votes, and whoever came in second became the vice president. In 1798, Federalist John Adams’s VP was Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson — and Thomas Jefferson hated the Alien and Sedition Acts. So did future president James Madison. Like all VPs, Vice President Jefferson had approximately no power. And James Madison wasn’t even vice president. So, like all great dissenters, they grabbed their pens and — anonymously — wrote the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. The K&V resolutions laid out what would come to be known as the nullification doctrine. The nullification doctrine posits that, as the federal government is the product of the Constitution, and the Constitution is a compact of the states, it’s the states that have the final say on any law’s constitutionality. If a state determines that a law exceeds the terms of the compact to which it agreed, it has the right to nullify that law within its own borders.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 13:41:21 +0000
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