Opinion ID: 107045
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: inherent authority of the executive.

Text: This Court has recognized that the right to travel abroad is an important aspect of the citizen's `liberty'  guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Kent v. Dulles, 357 U. S. 116, 127. In Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U. S. 500, 517, we reaffirmed that freedom of travel is a constitutional liberty closely related to rights of free speech and association. As nations have become politically and commercially more dependent upon one another and foreign policy decisions have come to have greater impact upon the lives of our citizens, the right to travel has become correspondingly more important. Through travel, by private citizens as well as by journalists and governmental officials, information necessary to the making of informed decisions can be obtained. And, under our constitutional system, ultimate responsibility for the making of informed decisions rests in the hands of the people. As Professor Chafee has pointed out, An American who has crossed the ocean is not obliged to form his opinions about our foreign policy merely from what he is told by officials of our government or by a few correspondents of American newspapers. Moreover, his views on domestic questions are enriched by seeing how foreigners are trying to solve similar problems. In many different ways direct contact with other countries contributes to sounder decisions at home. Chafee, Three Human Rights in the Constitution of 1787, 195-196 (1956). The constitutional basis of the right to travel and its importance to decision-making in our democratic society led this Court in Kent v. Dulles, supra , to conclude that [i]f that `liberty' is to be regulated, it must be pursuant to the law-making functions of the Congress. 357 U. S., at 129. Implicit in this statement, and at the very core of the holding in Kent v. Dulles , is a rejection of the argument there advanced and also made here by the Government that the Executive possesses an inherent power to prohibit or impede travel by restricting the issuance of passports. The Court in Kent expressly recognized that a passport is not only of great value, but also is necessary [4] to leave this country and to travel to most parts of the world. Kent v. Dulles, supra, at 121. The Court demonstrates in Kent v. Dulles , and I shall show in detail below, that there is no long-standing and consistent history of the exercise of an alleged inherent Executive power to limit travel or restrict the validity of passports. In view of the constitutional basis of the right to travel, the legal and practical necessity for passports, and the absence of a long-standing Executive practice of imposing area restrictions, I would rule here, as this Court did in Kent v. Dulles , that passport restrictions may be imposed only when Congress makes provision therefor in explicit terms. Kent v. Dulles, supra, at 130, consistent with constitutional guarantees. Cf. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579. I would hold expressly that the Executive has no inherent authority to impose area restrictions in time of peace.