The order signed this morning, asserting expanded federal enforcement authority over state-line crossings in three southern districts, will be litigated on its merits. The prior question, less discussed in the public press but the one a careful citizen ought to attend to, is whether the existing statutes authorize what the order asserts.

A free people may grant their executive considerable energy in the discharge of his constitutional duties. The treaty power, the conduct of foreign affairs, the command of the armed forces — these are vested in him by the constitutional text and require, by their nature, swift and unified action. What is not granted by the text, and not granted by any statute the Congress has plainly written, the executive may not assume by inference, however urgent the moment may feel.

The order in question rests, by its own terms, on a 1952 statute originally concerned with a different matter, stretched by successive administrations of both parties to cover matters its drafters did not contemplate. Each administration that stretches such a statute teaches the next that the statute may be stretched. The stretching is not, in any one instance, ruinous; the habit of stretching, compounded across decades, is the slow erosion of the constitutional design.

The proper course, when the executive believes the existing statutes are insufficient, is to ask the Congress for what the Congress alone may give: a clear authorization, written for the present circumstance, debated in the open, voted by the representatives the citizens can hold answerable. The shortcut — to read the existing texts beyond their fair sense — is tempting; the precedent is corrosive.

I do not prejudge the merits of the policy. I would observe only that a free Republic is preserved not chiefly by the wisdom of its officers but by the discipline of its forms.