484
Opinion of the Court
change our view. With those amendments, Congress, among other things, renewed § 5 but did so without changing its applicable standard. We doubt that Congress would depart from the settled interpretation of § 5 and impose a demonstrably greater burden on the jurisdictions covered by § 5, see supra, at 480, by dropping a footnote in a Senate Report instead of amending the statute itself. See Pierce v. Under-wood, 487 U. S. 552, 567 (1988) ("Quite obviously, reenacting precisely the same language would be a strange way to make a change"). See also City of Lockhart v. United States, 460 U. S. 125 (1983) (reaching its holding over Justice Marshall's dissent, which raised the argument now advanced by appellants regarding this passage in the Senate Report).
Nor does the portion of the House Report cited by Justice Stevens unambiguously call for the incorporation of § 2 into § 5. That portion of the Report states:
"[M]any voting and election practices currently in effect are outside the scope of [§ 5] . . . because they were in existence before 1965. . . . Under the Voting Rights Act, whether a discriminatory practice or procedure is of recent origin affects only the mechanism that triggers relief, i. e., litigation [under § 2] or preclearance [under § 5]." H. R. Rep. No. 97-227, p. 28 (1981).
The obvious thrust of this passage is to establish that pre-1965 discriminatory practices are not free from scrutiny under the Act just because they need not be precleared under § 5: Such practices might still violate § 2. But to say that pre-1965 practices can be reached solely by § 2 is not to say that all post-1965 changes that might violate § 2 may be reached by both § 2 and § 5 or that "the substantive standards for § 2 and § 5 [are] the same," see post, at 506 (opinion dissenting in part and concurring in part). Our ultimate conclusion is also not undercut by statements found in the "post-enactment legislative record," see post, at 506, n. 9, given that "the views of a subsequent Congress form a hazardous
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