When George Washington asked Alexander Hamilton to defend the constitutionality of the First Bank of the United States against the protests[1] of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph, Hamilton produced what has now become the doctrine of implied powers.
[2] Hamilton argued that the sovereign duties of a government implied the right to use means adequate to its ends.
James Monroe was sent by Thomas Jefferson to France to negotiate, with permission to spend up to $10 million on the port of New Orleans and parts of Florida.
Although Jefferson’s decision to purchase the Louisiana territory would ultimately be widely popular, it was not known to constitutional lawyers, nor even to Jefferson himself, whether he had had the legal authority to negotiate the price of the territory (ultimately violating his stipulated budget) without the approval of Congress.
[3] Later, directly borrowing from Hamilton, Chief Justice John Marshall invoked the implied powers of government in the United States Supreme Court case, McCulloch v.