342
Opinion of Souter, J.
to a racially discriminatory purpose so long as a change in voting law is not meant to diminish minority voting strength below its existing level. It is true that today's decision has a precursor of sorts in Beer v. United States, 425 U. S. 130 (1976), which holds that the only anticipated redistricting effect sufficient to bar preclearance is retrogression in minority voting strength, however dilutive of minority voting power a redistricting plan may otherwise be. But if today's decision achieves a symmetry with Beer, the achievement is merely one of well-matched error. The Court was mistaken in Beer when it restricted the effect prong of § 5 to retrogression, and the Court is even more wrong today when it limits the clear text of § 5 to the corresponding retrogressive purpose. Although I adhere to the strong policy of respecting precedent in statutory interpretation and so would not reexamine Beer, that policy does not demand that recognized error be compounded indefinitely, and the Court's prior mistake about the meaning of the effects requirement of § 5 should not be expanded by an even more erroneous interpretation of the scope of the section's purpose prong.
The Court's determination that Congress intended pre-clearance of a plan not shown to be free of dilutive intent (let alone a plan shown to be intentionally discriminatory) is not, however, merely erroneous. It is also highly unconvincing. The evidence in these very cases shows that the Bossier Parish School Board (School Board or Board) acted with intent to dilute the black vote, just as it acted with that same intent through decades of resistance to a judicial desegregation order. The record illustrates exactly the sort of relentless bad faith on the part of majority-white voters in covered jurisdictions that led to the enactment of § 5. The evidence all but poses the question why Congress would ever have meant to permit preclearance of such a plan, and it all but invites the answer that Congress could hardly have intended any such thing. While the evidence goes substantially unnoticed on the Court's narrow reading of the purpose
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