Cite as: 522 U. S. 34 (1997)
Breyer, J., dissenting
The majority, and Justice Scalia, make a further argument resting upon a distinction between the first and second sentences of the 1968 code that the Attorney General pre-cleared. The majority says, for example, that City of Rome "said nothing about the state-law default rule of majority voting in the second sentence," ante, at 39; and Justice Scalia refers to a "second sentence . . . default rule of majority voting for all municipalities that have not treated the matter in their charters," ante, at 40. The majority then finds that the Attorney General precleared the second-sentence default rule as applied to Monroe, apparently because it believes that "[t]he Government does not dispute that Georgia submitted the state-law default rule to the Attorney General in an 'unambiguous and recordable manner,' " ante, at 39. Justice Scalia reaches the same conclusion, not because of the Government's position, but because, in his view, the "burden was upon" the Attorney General to seek more information about the "city-by-city" effects of the statute at the time it was submitted. Ante, at 40.
A glance at the Georgia statute, supra, at 45, will make clear, however, just how finely the majority has had to parse the statute in its effort to escape the binding effect of precedent. That is because City of Rome (involving a city with a "majority" charter) and this case both concern the statute's second sentence. See Brief for Appellants in City of Rome v. United States, O. T. 1979, No. 78-1840, p. 90; City of Rome v. United States, 472 F. Supp. 221, 233 (DC 1979) ("Rome argues that . . . the 1968 Code mandated majority voting") (emphasis added). And nowhere does either the statute's second sentence or City of Rome explicitly make the default/ deference distinction that the majority finds critical.
More importantly, there is no reason to think the distinction is critical in respect to the matter here at issue. The Government has not conceded, silently or otherwise, that the Attorney General's preclearance of a statutory "default rule" somehow precleared the application of some such rule to
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