- Alien and Sedition Act : Were Four Bills passed In 1798 by The Federalists Controlled Congress as America Prepared for War with France.
- It made It Harder to become a citizen of the US .
- Designed to silence and weaken the Democratic-Republican Party
- These resolutions were passed by the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and were authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively. It argued that the federal government had no authority to exercise power not specifically delegated to it in the Constitution.
- The Virginia Resolution, authored by Madison, said that by enacting the Alien and Sedition Acts, Congress was exercising “a power not delegated by the Constitution, but on the contrary, expressly and positively forbidden by one of the amendments thereto; a power, which more than any other, ought to produce universal alarm, because it is leveled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.
- The Kentucky Resolutions, authored by Jefferson, went further than Madison’s Virginia Resolution and asserted that states had the power to nullify unconstitutional federal laws. The Kentucky Resolution declared in part, “The several states who formed the Constitution, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those states, of all unauthorized acts….is the rightful remedy.”