River and Dam Act

A law that was signed by President Jake Featherston of the Confederate States of America in July 1934 and took effect in the fictional Timeline-191 world created by author Harry Turtledove.

Summary of Act

The basis for the law had its genesis in the Mississippi River floods of 1927, which wrecked whole areas of the Mississippi Valley and displaced tens of thousands of Confederate citizens and black residents from their communities. The then-governing Whig Party did nothing to help lower the plight of the people, and Featherston was bothered by their do-nothing attitude (albeit for political reasons, not humanitarian ones).

Possible Constitutional Issues

Once in power, Featherston set out to make good on his campaign promise to control the rivers by building dams and levies - which went against Article 1, Section 8 of the Confederate Constitution that does not let Congress appropriate money for internal improvements saving river navigation. The real-life document is the US Constitution nearly word-for-word with but a few exceptions that prohibit such spending for fear one section develops an industrial sway over the agricultural just as had happened before the War of Secession. But just like the US Constitution, Article 3 does not detail the powers of the Court and would have required an analogues to the Judiciary Act of 1789 and Marbury v. Madison to determine the number of justices (seven for the CSA) and judicial review respectively. This public-works program bucked what would be a long-standing Confederate tradition but had the triple-sided effect of giving work to thousands of white Confederate citzens and to giving the impoverished region electricity and hope that their homes won't get washed away in the future - with the third side being that since the law would be overwhelmingly popular, the Confederate States Supreme Court would be making its position vulnerable when it moved to strike down the law as unconstitutional, which it did that autumn. And all of this was part of Featherston's ultimate plan to extend the power of the executive branch.

Jake Featherston Versus James McReynolds

A great outcry arose over the controversy, and Featherston went to the press to present his side of the story. Since his director of communications Saul Goldman controlled the cinema, newspapers and radio, the public heard only Featherston's viewpoint, and the Supreme Court under Chief Justice James Clark McReynolds became the hated pariahs of the land. When he was certain that the time was right, Jake Featherston announced in a radio broadcast: "James McReynolds has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" (an almost identical quote was made by Andrew Jackson following a United States Supreme Court ruling). The Supreme Court was abolished as soon as a precedent was found by Attorney General Ferdinand Koenig, and McReynolds went to Featherston's office to argue the matter. He exited an hour later as a shaken, broken man, and retired into obscurity.

Real World Relationship

Semi-analogous to Franklin D. Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority, the River and Dam Act gave thousands of people work in the economic hardship of the Depression. Roosevelt even had trouble with the United States Supreme Court over the constitutionality of his program, although the judicial branch of the federal government remained intact, unlike its luckless counterpart in the fictional CSA.