Whether Congress could authorize the bridge after the Court had ordered its alteration or removal, thereby preventing enforcement of that part of the decree.
Holding
Yes. Congress’s valid regulation of navigation made the bridge lawful going forward, so the alteration-or-removal order could not be enforced. The previously awarded costs remained payable.
Reasoning
The original decree rested on a conflict between the bridge and federal protections for navigation. Virginia had authorized the bridge, but that authorization was subject to Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.
The commerce power includes navigation and permits Congress to determine what counts as an unlawful obstruction to it. By authorizing the bridge at its existing height and requiring boats to accommodate it, Congress changed the governing law. The bridge might still impede boats in fact, but it was no longer an unlawful obstruction.
A final judgment awarding money cannot be undone by later legislation. The order to alter or remove the bridge was different: it imposed a continuing obligation based on an ongoing violation of the public right of navigation. Once Congress lawfully changed that right, the basis for prospective enforcement disappeared. The award of costs, by contrast, survived.
The Virginia–Kentucky compact promising free navigation of the Ohio River could not restrict Congress’s constitutional commerce power. Nor did the law violate the ban on preferences among states’ ports: any disadvantage to Pittsburgh was incidental to the navigation regulation, not a direct preference for the ports of one state over another.
Because the statute authorized reconstruction, the Court dissolved the injunction against rebuilding. It also declined, as a matter of discretion, to issue contempt sanctions for violating that injunction.