No Exit

Once again the State Department has begun to consider methods of tying its passport regulations about the necks of subversives. Suddenly very stern, it now threatens rigid enforcement of provisions in the Internal Security Act of 1950 that forbid members of proscribed organizations to apply for permission to leave the country. Possibly the Department will observe the letter of the Act even more closely, and direct a suspicious glare upon itself, for it is also an offense for government employees "knowing or having reason to believe" that applicants are Communists to issue passports to them.

It is easy but misleading to attribute the Department's eagerness to bring all its machinery down on American Communists to a desire for efficient enactment of legislation. Department officials know very well that the Supreme Court has given them considerable flexibility in the matter of passport regulations, and consequently, that decisions on when to prosecute subversives are almost entirely up to the Passport Office.

They know, for example, that of all the provisions of the Act those covering foreign travel are constitutionally the weakest. In 1958, the Court upheld the freedom to travel in Kent v. Dulles, and although reluctant to specify if this freedom could be abused, it certainly did not insist that government officials do their best to limit it. In other words, as soon as the State Department initiates a repressive policy such as forcing subversives to state their affiliations on passport applications, it transforms its employees into contitutional interpreters. And foreign service officers are hardly competent to decide if a required admission of subversive affiliation violates the Fifth Amendment by making self-incrimination compulsory.

Yet there are reasons more compelling than legal complexity which should persuade the Department to abandon its schemes to keep Communists at home. Since its passage in 1950 the Act has been used constantly as a platform from which bureaucrats could subject various organizations to arbitrary and unnecessary harassment. The State Department need not indulge in precisely the kind of behavior that frequently makes the government's treatment of its dissenting citizens so unfair and so obnoxious.