262
Opinion of the Court
that duty, a federal court must neither affirmatively obstruct state reapportionment nor permit federal litigation to be used to impede it." 507 U. S., at 34 (emphasis added). In the present cases, unlike in Growe, there is no suggestion that the District Court failed to allow the state court adequate opportunity to develop a redistricting plan. The second distinction is that the state-court plan here, unlike that in Growe, was subject to § 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 42 U. S. C. § 1973c. The District Court rested its injunction of the state-court plan on the ground that necessary preclearance had not been obtained. It is that challenged premise that we examine first.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act provides that whenever a covered jurisdiction, such as Mississippi, see 30 Fed. Reg. 9897 (1965), "shall enact or seek to administer" a change in "any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure," the State must obtain preclearance from the District Court for the District of Columbia or the Attorney General before the change may be enforced. 42 U. S. C. § 1973c. The Act requires preclearance of all voting changes, ibid.; see Dougherty County Bd. of Ed. v. White, 439 U. S. 32, 38-39 (1978), and there is no dispute that this includes voting changes mandated by order of a state court, see, e. g., In re McMillin, 642 So. 2d 1336, 1339 (Miss. 1994). Rather, the controversy pertains to the proviso in § 1973c to the effect that, where the preclearance submission is made to the Attorney General, the voting change may be enforced if "the Attorney General has not interposed an objection within sixty days after such submission . . . ."
Appellants in No. 01-1437 (originally the state plaintiffs) assert that the District Court erred in believing that the Chancery Court's plan lacked preclearance. It was automatically rendered enforceable, they contend, by DOJ's failure to object within the 60-day period running from the state attorney general's initial submission on December 26, 2001— or, in the alternative, it was subsequently rendered enforce-
Page: Index Previous 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007