Cite as: 525 U. S. 266 (1999)
Thomas, J., dissenting
a covered jurisdiction cannot cleverly avoid preclearance requirements by the simple expedient of making voting changes by nonlegislative means.
The majority's interpretation appears to render superfluous the "enact" prong of the statute. A person could not be "denied the right to vote for failure to comply with" a covered jurisdiction's enactment affecting voting, as § 5 prohibits absent federal preclearance, unless the jurisdiction was administering its enacted laws. And the majority's explanation that "seek" as it modifies "to administer" is a "temporal distinction," ante, at 279, is unsatisfactory because it ignores that "shall" as it modifies "enact" is also a temporal limitation. Both prongs of the statute, not surprisingly, are written in terms of simple futurity, given § 5's prophylactic nature.
My interpretation of the statutory phrase also more accurately reflects the section's purpose. As we have previously recognized, § 5 was enacted as
" '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. . . . Congress therefore decided . . . "to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victi[m]," . . . .'" Beer v. United States, 425 U. S. 130, 140 (1976) (quoting H. R. Rep. No. 94-196, pp. 57-58 (1970)).
See also Reno v. Bossier Parish School Bd., 520 U. S. 471, 477 (1997) (quoting Beer); Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900, 926 (1995) (same). It follows that Congress intended to subject to federal preclearance only the policy decisions made by jurisdictions that it found to be the "perpetrators of the evil" by means of the § 4(b) coverage formula that the majority describes, ante, at 269-270. California has never been found to satisfy the coverage test and therefore is not one of the "perpetrators" that § 5 is designed to thwart. I therefore
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