"If the adoption of the Alien Friends Act represented a dramatic short-term political triumph for the Federalist Party, however, it proved virtually inconsequential as a matter of national policy. The long-term importance of the Act lay instead in the galvanizing effect that it had on Republicans, spurring them to develop competing, and ultimately much more influential, accounts of the constitutional status of immigrants and governmental authority over immigration. Republican House leaders Edward Livingston of New York and Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania spearheaded the opposition to the Act. They refuted at length the dual Federalist contentions that foreigners lacked constitutional rights, and that the Constitution permitted the federal Congress and President to usurp the authority of the states to regulate immigration. Republicans rejected the argument made by Otis and others that "the Constitutional compact was made between citizens only, and that, therefore, its provisions were not intended to extend to aliens." "[T]he Constitution expressly excludes any.. .distinction between citizen and alien," Livingston maintained, and it was "an acknowledged principle of the common law ... that alien friends...residing among us, are entitled to the protection of our laws." Citizens and aliens alike thus enjoyed "the same equal distribution of justice [and] ... the same humane provision to protect their innocence. "So indistinguishable was the constitutional status of aliens and citizens, Livingston warned, that the same rationale for subjecting "a few unprotected aliens" to the Act's "inquisitorial power" would "apply with equal strength ... in the case of citizens." The same "plea of necessity," he warned, could justify the banishment of both."