Court Opinion

ID: 9444758
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:11:02.593771+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:59.578980
License: Public Domain

EDGERTON, Circuit Judge.
I. concur in the opinion of the court.
The Supreme Court has said: “Undoubtedly the right of locomotion, the right to remove from one place to another according to inclination, is an attribute of personal liberty, and the right, ordinarily, of free transit from or through the territory of any State is a right secured by the 14th Amendment and by other provisions of the Constitution.” 1 Fréedom to leave a country or a hemisphere is as much a part of liberty as freedom to leave a State.
Those who inflict a deprivation of, liberty are not the final arbiters of its legality. Due process of law is a judicial question.
Arbitrary action is not due process of law. Taking the facts alleged in the complaint to be true, as we must on this, record, denial of a-passport to Shachtman because the Independent Socialist League was on the Attorney General’s list was arbitrary for several reasons.
1. The League is “an anti-Communist educational organization.” In this: respect the case is similar to Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath,. 341 U.S. 123, 71 S.Ct. 624, 95 L.Ed. 817.2
2. The Passport Division knew plaintiff had tried and failed to get the Attorney General to give the League a hearing.
3. The premise that a man is not fit to work for the government does not support the conclusion that he is not fit to-go to Europe. The Attorney General’s; list was prepared for screening government employees, not passport applicants.
4. Even in connection with screening-government employees, membership in a -listed organization was intended to be only an inconclusive item of evidence.'
5. In other connections, the list has. not even any “competency to prove the *945subversive character of the listed associations * * 3
The defendants cannot bring their denial of a passport into conformity with due process of law by merely ceasing to base the denial on the Attorney General’s list. Due process requires more than that a deprivation of liberty be not based on facts that are insufficient. It requires that a deprivation be based on facts that are sufficient and are found after a hearing. In Bauer v. Acheson, D.C.D.C., 106 F.Supp. 445, a three-judge District Court interpreted the Passport Act as requiring a hearing when a passport is revoked or its renewal is refused. The District Court for the District of Columbia has recently held that a hearing is necessary before a passport is denied. Nathan v. Dulles, D.C.D.C., 129 F.Supp. 951.
The government urges that a passport involves foreign relations and that the issuance of a passport is therefore in the exclusive control of the State Department. But the State Department’s control of activities that involve both foreign relations and domestic liberties is not exclusive. If it were exclusive, the State Department could put an American citizen in jail and keep him there permanently on the mere request of a foreign government. “[T]he very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations * * * like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subordination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution.” United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304, 320, 57 S.Ct. 216, 221, 81 L.Ed. 255. “Since denial of an American passport has a very direct bearing on the applicant’s personal liberty to travel outside the United States, the executive department’s discretion, although in a political matter, must be exercised with regard to the constitutional rights of the citizens * * Bauer v. Acheson, D.C.D.C., 106 F.Supp. 445, 451.
To speak of “the Secretary’s discretion with respect to the issue of a passport”, Perkins v. Elg, 307 U.S. 325, 350, 59 S.Ct. 884, 896, 83 L.Ed. 1320, is not to say that the Secretary may in his discretion deprive a citizen of liberty without due process of law. Moreover, in 1939, when Perkins v. Elg was decided, Americans could, as now they cannot, leave the country for any destination without a passport. Yet even then, the Supreme Court overruled the Secretary’s action in denying a passport.
Neither the Passport Act nor any Executive Order should be interpreted as intended to authorize the Secretary of State to deny a passport arbitrarily or without a hearing. “We must, of course, defer to the strong presumption * * * that Congress legislated in accordance with the Constitution. Legislation must, if possible, be given a meaning that will enable it to survive.” Association of Westinghouse Salaried Employees v. Westinghouse Electric Corp., 348 U.S. 437, 452-453, 75 S.Ct. 488, 496, rehearing denied 349 U.S. 925, 75 S.Ct. 657.

. Williams v. Fears, 179 U.S. 270, 274, 21 S.Ct. 128, 129, 45 L.Ed. 186. The ease involved a state tax on “emigrant agents”. The Court sustained the tax because it did not, unless perhaps “incidentally and remotely”, affect “freedom of egress from the State”.

. That case, like this, arose on motion to dismiss.

. United States v. Remington, 2 Cir., 191 F.2d 246, 252; Swan, Chief Judge, and Augustus N. Hand and Learned Hand, Circuit Judges.