Cite as: 528 U. S. 320 (2000)
Opinion of Souter, J.
language qualifying or limiting the terms of abridgment which it shares with the Amendment, abridgment under § 5 presumably covers any vote dilution, not retrogression alone, and no redistricting scheme should receive preclearance without a showing that it is nondilutive. See Bossier Parish I, supra, at 493 (Breyer, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (use in § 5 of Fifteenth Amendment language indicates that § 5 prohibits new plans with dilutive purposes). Such, in fact, was apparently just what Congress had in mind when it addressed § 5 to the agility of covered jurisdictions in keeping one step ahead of dilution challenges under the Constitution (and previous versions of the Voting Rights Act) by adopting successive voting schemes, each with a distinctive feature that perpetuated the abridgment of the minority vote:
"Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat widespread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims." South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S., at 328 (footnote omitted).
This evil in Congress's sights was discrimination, abridgment of the right to vote, not merely discrimination that happens to cause retrogression, and Congress's intent to frustrate the unconstitutional evil by barring a replacement scheme of discrimination from being put into effect was not confined to any one subset of discriminatory schemes. The School Board's purpose thus seems to lie at the very center of what Congress meant to counter by requiring pre-clearance, and the Court's holding that any nonretrogressive purpose survives § 5 is an exceedingly odd conclusion.
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