Hello Thomas Jefferson Hour podcast listeners and thank you for listening.

We are having such fun.

They were fun shows today.

Fun shows.

It started with a letter from a listener as many of our conversations do thank you for sending your questions

in.

We never get to all of them on the air, but we get to every one of them as far as reading and that

determines a lot of times what we talk about.

But the question this week was about the Kentucky resolutions.

The Kentucky resolutions were written by Thomas Jefferson in 1798

in response to the alien and sedition laws which were passed by the Federalist Congress in a war scare with France.

And it turns out, I mean we didn't expect this to really happen David but it turns out there are interesting

parallels between the Kentucky resolutions and that crisis of 1798 and some of the constitutional

struggles that are going on at this moment, it turns out that when

the national government becomes a kind of a phalanx, it's often the case that states step up and either refuse to enforce certain

types of laws within their state boundaries or say they're going to engage in their own foreign policy or

challenge something that the national government has done in the courts and this

was Jefferson. Jefferson believed that the states were sovereign, not fully sovereign, that they shared

sovereignty with the national government and that in certain circumstances the states had

a duty and a right to step up and challenge the authority of the national government.

We haven't seen much of this since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but now we're seeing

a lot of it across the United States.

...