Soon after the Kentucky Resolutions had been thus disposed of the resolutions from Virginia were received and referred to a committee; the report of this committee is longer, more precise, and the proceedings upon it may be known in part.[1] The committee report that after most serious consideration and mature deliberation it is decidedly of the opinion that "a recommendation to repeal the Alien and Sedition Laws would be unwise and impolitic." An equally pointed negative is given to the remedy suggested by Virginia: "No State government by a Legislative act is competent to declare an act of the Federal Government unconstitutional and void, it being an improper interference with that jurisdiction which is exclusively vested in the Courts of the United States." The result of this reasoning is a resolution which differs from the report in only one particular, but that an important one; the resolution omits the declaration contained in the report that the power to pronounce an act of federal legislation unconstitutional and void belongs exclusively to the federal courts. It is therefore only a rejection of the Virginia remedy, not an assertion of a more appropriate one. Unfortunately the debates upon this report and resolution have not been preserved, but the proceedings so far as recorded are worthy of consideration. Prior to the final vote upon the report and resolution five votes were taken upon questions involving some portions of the whole; two of these presented only the question of the expediency of the Alien and Sedition Laws; the other three dealt with the remedy suggested by Virginia. The final vote was forty-two to twenty-four; this would seem to indicate that the endorsement of the Alien and Sedition Laws was made more prominent than the condemnation of the Virginia remedy.[2]
In the Senate the Kentucky Resolutions were presented but no action was taken upon them; in reply to Virginia the resolutions of the House of Delegates were adopted.[3] The action of the state was not officially transmitted to either Virginia or Kentucky.[4]
In Maryland, discussion of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions seems to have been confined almost entirely to the legislature; in Pennsylvania the debate over them was more widely extended. Philadelphia, as was natural from its commercial, social,
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ For the proceedings of the House of Delegates on the reply to Virginia see the Albany Centinel, February 1, 1799. H. U.
- ↑ Index to the Journals of the Senate and House of Delegates, (Annapolis, 1857), II. 60, 66, 280.
- ↑ All the replies officially transmitted to Virginia were included in the pamphlet, Proceedings of the Virginia Assembly on the Answers of Sundry States to their Resolutions, 1800. H. U. The reply of the Maryland House of Delegates to Kentucky was merely a committee report.
