362
Opinion of Souter, J.
B
The majority purports to shoulder its burden to justify a limited reading of "abridging" by offering an argument from the "context" of § 5. Since § 5 covers only changes in voting practices, this fact is said to be a reason to think that "abridging" as used in the statute is narrower than its cognate in the Fifteenth Amendment, which covers both changes and continuing systems. Ante, at 329-330, 333-334. In other words, on the majority's reading, the baseline in a § 5 challenge is the status quo that is to be changed, while the baseline in a Fifteenth Amendment challenge (or one under § 2 of the Voting Rights Act) is a nondiscriminatory regime, whether extant or not. From the fact that § 5 applies only when a voting change is proposed, however, it does not follow that the baseline of abridgment is the status quo; Congress could perfectly well have decided that when a jurisdiction is forced to change its voting scheme (because of malapportionment shown by a new census, say), it ought to show that the replacement is constitutional. This, of course, is just what the unqualified language and its Fifteenth Amendment parallel would suggest.
In fact, the majority's principal reason for reading intent to abridge as covering only intent to cause retrogression is not the peculiar context of changes in the law, but Beer v. United States, 425 U. S. 130 (1976), which limited the sort of "effect" that would be an abridgment to retrogressive effect. The strength of the majority's position, then, depends on the need for parallel limitations on the purpose and effect prongs of § 5. The need, however, is very much to the contrary.
1
Insofar as Beer is authority for defining the "effect" of a redistricting plan that would bar preclearance under § 5, I will of course respect it as precedent. The policy of stare decisis is at its most powerful in statutory interpretation
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