http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/all-the-presidents-tools_b_34213.htmlEXCELLENT HISTORY LESSON, EDITORIAL AND POLEMIC! DO READ THE WHOLE THING!
During presidential campaign of 1800, a Richmond newspaper editor named James Thomas Callender was arrested under the statutes of the Sedition Act of 1798 for publishing editorials critical of President John Adams.
Adams used the Sedition Act as a means to imprison congressmen, newspaper publishers and even the Newark, NJ town drunk who joked to a bartender that President Adams ought to be shot in the ass with a cannon. True story. Luther Baldwin, the drunk who threatened the presidential ass, was held in prison indefinitely until he could pay the fine while James Callender was sentenced to nine months in jail and fined $200.
The goal of the law was clear: to maintain Federalist Party control. Of course the publicly stated goal of the Sedition Act and its sister-law, the Alien Act, was to prevent Federalists from being weakened in a time when we were smoking Frenchmen out of their holes. For this reason, these laws carried considerable public support. Yet for the record, James Callender, Luther Baldwin, and Congressman Matthew Lyon (who was also imprisoned) were clearly not French. And there's no records indicating Luther was an actual Baldwin Brother who, by the way, were equally despised by conservatives even then.
The presidential candidate for whom Callender became a martyr was Vice President Thomas Jefferson. Obviously Jefferson could not personally criticize Adams due to the Sedition Act, so Callender served as a Sedition Act lightning rod for his fellow Virginian. It was the only way Jefferson could criticize the president and get away with it without being incarcerated as an enemy of the state.
Shortly after the election in which Jefferson narrowly defeated Adams, the Sedition Act expired without ever being challenged in the Supreme Court. It failed to give the Federalists the lasting power they craved and became an historical albatross for Adams. Nevertheless, it made a repeat performance more than 100 years later at the behest of President Wilson in 1918. This time, however, legislators successfully repealed the law.
So that brings us to the present course of events....