NULLIFICATION OF FEDERAL POWER

By Investigating Journalist Jon Rappoport
December 18, 2010
NewsWithViews.com

The US Constitution was written to establish a list of federal powers, and to reserve, for the states and the people, everything else.

In 1798, Thomas Jefferson pondered this matter, because the Congress had just passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts, which he opposed.

Jefferson maintained these Acts were illegal, because the federal government had no power to create them.

Secretly, he authored a text that became known as the Kentucky Resolution. Its opening statement pronounced two general principles: the individual states maintained all powers not specifically granted, in the Constitution, to the federal government, and the federal government was not the final judge of how far its own powers extended.

“...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 [central] 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 [each state] has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.â€