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On the dismissal of the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798 as being any kind of relevant, acceptable, and sufficient evidence of U.S. immorality
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The A & S Acts were a coup de tat (gahd, my French sucks!) snow-job by the relatively-immoral Federalists and their president John (Quincy?) Adams. These bumble-heads had opposition from the get-go. The morally-superior Thomas Jefferson quickly reversed this bugger before any consequences ensued. In sum then, it's just a Machiavellian blip on the screen of the otherwise-unprecedented morality of early America.
Here's wiki-proof about that:
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While Jefferson did denounce the Sedition Act as a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, which protected the right of free speech, his main argument on the unconstitutionality of the act was that it violated the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In 1798 when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, First Amendment rights did not restrict the states, as they now do. Jefferson more strongly argued the Federal Government had overstepped its bounds in the Alien and Sedition Acts by attempting to exercise undelegated powers. Apart from Virginia and Kentucky the other state legislatures, all of them Federalist, rejected Jefferson's position by resolutions that either supported the acts, or denied that Virginia and Kentucky could denounce it.[1]
The judicial redress for bad legislation under the doctrine of judicial review was not established until Marbury v. Madison in 1803; the Supreme Court in 1798, particularly Mr. Justice Samuel Chase, was openly hostile to the Federalists' opponents. The Alien and Sedition Acts were not appealed to the Supreme Court for review, although individual Supreme Court Justices, sitting in circuit, heard many of the cases prosecuting opponents of the Federalists.
In order to address the constitutionality of the measures, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison sought to unseat the Federalists, appealing to the people to remedy the constitutional violation, and drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which called on the states to nullify the federal legislation. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions reflect the Compact Theory, which states that the United States are made up of a voluntary union of States that agree to cede some of their authority in order to join the union, but that the states do not, ultimately, surrender their sovereign rights. Therefore, under the Compact Theory, states can determine if the federal government has violated its agreements, including the Constitution, and nullify such violations or even withdraw from the Union. Variations of this theory were also argued at the Hartford Convention at the time of the War of 1812, and by the Southern states just before the American Civil War.
The Sedition Act was set to expire in 1801, coinciding with the end of the Adams administration. While this prevented its constitutionality from being directly decided by the Supreme Court, subsequent mentions of the Sedition Act in Supreme Court opinions have assumed that it would be ruled unconstitutional if ever tested in court. For example, in the seminal free speech case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court declared, "Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history." 376 U.S. 254, 276 (1964).
The Alien and Sedition Act was a set of laws that allowed the president of the time period to expel foreign citizens suspected of treason. The law made it illegal to oppose any measure of false or hostile words against the government. The law also applied to the government's policies.
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Ed
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