In the light of the facts of the case counsel for the steel companies could most efficiently sustain their contentions by emphasizing the impropriety of executive seizure in plain opposition to the obvious intent of Congress expressed in a statute anticipating such emergency and explicitly providing a different solution. They avoided challenging the constitutionality in the absence of a statute of an emergency power to seize private productive facilities. In fact, the steel companies openly conceded the existence of broad emergency power. They made it clear that their view “does not mean that the Government is powerless to deal with the threat to steel production which arises from the current labor dispute.” If necessary “... Congress can legislate appropriately and specifically to protect the nation from threatened disaster.”[778] The determining factor in assessing the legitimacy of government action in this case, however, was the nature of the legislative-executive relationship involved. Presidential action, the companies argued, could be arranged on a “spectrum” of legitimacy[779]--at one end, cooperative executive-legislative action. Congress and President might unite in the execution of a program or Congress subsequently might ratify a prior exercise of power by the executive.[780] At the other end, as in this case, the presidential action violates a clear congressional intent.[781] Here “... the statutory processes have been ignored ...,”[782] and an early but eminent constitutional precedent was cited as squarely meeting the instant situation. An Act passed by Congress in 1799 suspended commercial intercourse between the United States and France during the undeclared naval war between the two nations. The act provided that no American vessel should be permitted to proceed to any French port under penalty of forfeiture, and authorized the seizure of all American ships bound _to_ any French ports. President Adams instructed commanders of United States armed vessels to seize all American ships bound _to_ or _from_ French ports. Acting under these presidential instructions, Captain Little stopped and seized on the high seas a vessel bound _from_ a French port. The Court through Chief Justice John Marshall held that Congress had prescribed by its legislation the manner of which seizures were to be carried into execution and had excluded the seizure of any vessel bound _from_ rather than _to_ a French port. And even though the executive construction was calculated to increase the effectiveness of the legislation, the executive had no right to expand the law as enacted.[783]