Thomas Jefferson & James Madison on States Rights

Here are links to and quotes from two very important documents written by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. These documents are relevant to the current political debates. They are relevant for their explanation of why it is the right, it is the duty of the sovereign states of the United States of America to interpose and nullify the flood of un-Constitutional laws that are being passed by the Progressives in Congress and are being signed into law by our Progressive president.

For the sovereign states not to nullify, not to interpose would be to nullify the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of our Bill of Rights. For the American people not to resist these laws is to surrender our freedom, our sovereignty, it would be to surrender the very essence of what it means to be an American!

Thomas Jefferson, Resolutions Relative to the Alien and Sedition Acts

1. Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes,–delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions

Report of the Committee to whom were referred the Communications of various State, relative to the Resolutions of the last General Assembly of this State, concerning the Alien and Sedition Laws.

Whatever room might be found in the proceedings of some of the states, who have disapproved of the resolutions of the General Assembly of this commonwealth, passed on the 21st day of December, 1798, for painful remarks on the spirit and manner of those proceedings, it appears to the committee most consistent with the duty, as well as dignity, of the General Assembly, to hasten an oblivion of every circumstance which might be construed into a diminution of mutual respect, confidence, and affection, among the members of the Union.

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