Cite as: 525 U. S. 266 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
intrusion, however, and our holding today adds nothing of constitutional moment to the burdens that the Act imposes.
The State also urges that certain of our prior decisions require a covered jurisdiction to exercise some discretion or policy choice in order to trigger § 5's preclearance requirements. In particular, the State relies on Young v. Fordice, 520 U. S. 273 (1997), and City of Monroe v. United States, 522 U. S. 34 (1997) (per curiam). The State, however, seeks to place more weight on these cases than they will bear. The State relies foremost upon Young, which involved a § 5 challenge to a covered State's efforts to comply with voting changes mandated by the National Voters' Registration Act. We concluded that changes brought about by efforts at compliance were themselves the result of discretionary decisions by the State, and these changes required § 5 pre-clearance: "This Court has made clear that minor, as well as major, changes require preclearance. This is true even where, as here, the changes are made in an effort to comply with federal law, so long as those changes reflect policy choices made by state or local officials." 520 U. S., at 284 (citations omitted). Like the District Court, the State seeks to invoke Young for the proposition that only the "policy choices" of covered jurisdictions are subject to the preclearance requirements. Young, however, involved an effort to comply with an Act of Congress, the very body that enacted the Voting Rights Act. Congress retains the authority to curtail the Act's protections with subsequent legislation; alternatively, Congress may be assumed to have accounted for the policies underlying the Act in rendering new law. Accordingly, the requirement that only "policy choices . . . by state and local officials" would trigger the § 5 requirements in Young served merely to isolate for preclearance those changes that are not wholly creatures of Congress.
The State also seeks to rely on City of Monroe, in which we held that preclearance of a voting change included in a statewide law empowered a municipality to implement that
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