926
Opinion of the Court
H. R. Rep. No. 91-397, p. 8 (1969). As we explained in Beer v. United States,
" 'Section 5 was a response to a common practice in some jurisdictions of staying one step ahead of the federal courts by passing new discriminatory voting laws as soon as the old ones had been struck down. That practice had been possible because each new law remained in effect until the Justice Department or private plaintiffs were able to sustain the burden of proving that the new law, too, was discriminatory. . . . Congress therefore decided, as the Supreme Court held it could, "to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victim," by "freezing election procedures in the covered areas unless the changes can be shown to be nondiscriminatory." ' " 425 U. S., at 140 (quoting H. R. Rep. No. 94-196, pp. 57-58 (1975) (footnotes omitted)).
Based on this historical understanding, we recognized in Beer that "the purpose of § 5 has always been to insure that no voting-procedure changes would be made that would lead to a retrogression in the position of racial minorities with respect to their effective exercise of the electoral franchise." 425 U. S., at 141. The Justice Department's maximization policy seems quite far removed from this purpose. We are especially reluctant to conclude that § 5 justifies that policy given the serious constitutional concerns it raises. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301 (1966), we upheld § 5 as a necessary and constitutional response to some States' "extraordinary stratagem[s] of contriving new rules of various kinds for the sole purpose of perpetuating voting discrimination in the face of adverse federal court decrees." Id., at 335 (footnote omitted); see also City of Rome v. United States, 446 U. S., at 173-183. But our belief in Katzenbach that the federalism costs exacted by § 5 preclearance could be justified by those extraordinary circumstances does not
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