Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions - Essay ExampleHowever this evolution came with a effort that was marked by numerous constitutional crises. Perhaps the most important early constitutional crisis that dealt with this resultant revolved around the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws, which dealt censorship in the press, immigration, treason, and related punishments, were established by national government and endorsed by a majority of the states as a means of securing the national recourse and welfare during its time of early development, that they were believed by several key founding fathers notably doubting Thomas Jefferson and James capital of Wisconsin to be unconstitutional. In response to the laws, Jefferson penned the Kentucky Resolution and Madison the Virginia Resolution both documents that mapped by a protest against the national laws which eventually fed into those later constitutional fights. In this brief paper, the arguments Jefferson and Madison put forward will be compared and contrasted.Both Jefferson and Madison relied on a theory of a national compact in the establishment of the US Constitution which argued that the states were the true representatives of the people and that they had endorsed the national constitution, but only so far as it went in carrying out its limited powers enumerated in the Constitution. Madison (1798) wrote that the Virginia host viewed the national governments role as resulting from the compact, to which the states are parties as limited by the theatre of operations sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact. He argued that that the states had a right and in fact were duty brim to interpose when the national government overstepped its role and sought powers that the states believed were beyond the limits of its liberty. Jefferson (1799) agreed, claiming that if the national government were the sole authority regarding the limits of its authority it would lead to the dis solution of the states and a