Answer:
Explanation:
Virginia in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and were authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively. The resolutions 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.” Madison hoped that other states would register their opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts as beyond the powers given to Congress.
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, “[T]he several states who formed that instrument [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.”
The ideas in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions became a precursor to John C. Calhoun’s arguments about the power of states to nullify federal laws. However, during the nullification controversy of the 1830s, Madison rejected the legitimacy of nullification, and argued that it was not part of the Virginia position in 1798.
