What the Cold War Did to Passports
Historian Julia Rose Kraut, author of 'Threat of Dissent,' surfaced the Kent v. Dulles precedent on Bluesky in response to an Intercept report that Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who has already sought to punish immigrants for their speech — would have new legislative authority to extend that punishment to U.S. citizens; in 1958 the Supreme Court held that the right to travel cannot be conditioned on a citizen's political speech.
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The Intercept reported in September 2025 that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as senator and as secretary had already sought to punish noncitizens for protected speech, was poised under newly proposed legislation to extend that authority to U.S. citizens — most concretely through revocation of passports as a sanction for political activity. Historian Julia Rose Kraut, whose book Threat of Dissent documents the federal record of speech-based passport and citizenship sanctions across the twentieth century, posted a brief reminder to the public conversation: it was tried in the Cold War; the Supreme Court intervened.
The Court’s 1958 ruling in Kent v. Dulles held that the right of a U.S. citizen to travel — including the State Department’s discretion in denying passports on the basis of political beliefs — could not be conditioned on speech without specific statutory authority that did not, in that case, exist. The legislation the Intercept describes would be the kind of authority the Court found absent. Kraut does not predict what the courts will do; she points at the historical fact that the question has been answered before.