366
Opinion of Souter, J.
tions, annexations of predominantly white areas, or the adoption of discriminatory redistricting plans." S. Rep. No. 94-295, pp. 15-17 (citation omitted).
Congress thus referred to § 5 as a way to make the situation better ("promoting"), not merely as a stopgap to keep it from getting worse ("preserving").
It is all the more difficult to understand how the majority in Beer could have been so oblivious to this clear congressional objective, when a decade before Beer the Court had realized that modifying legal requirements was the way discriminatory jurisdictions stayed one jump ahead of the Constitution. In United States v. Mississippi, 380 U. S. 128 (1965), the Court described a series of ingenious devices preventing minority registration, and in South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301 (1966), the Court said that
"Congress knew that some of the States . . . had resorted to the extraordinary stratagem of contriving new rules of various kinds for the sole purpose of perpetuating voting discrimination in the face of adverse federal court decrees. Congress had reason to suppose that these States might try similar maneuvers in the future in order to evade the remedies for voting discrimination contained in the Act itself." Id., at 335 (footnote omitted); see also id., at 314-315.
Likewise, well before Beer, our nascent dilution jurisprudence addressed practices mentioned in the congressional lists of tactics targeted by § 5. See, e. g., White v. Regester, 412 U. S. 755, 765-766, 768-769 (1973).
In fine, the full legislative history shows beyond any doubt just what the unqualified text of § 5 provides. The statute contains no reservation in favor of customary abridgment grown familiar after years of relentless discrimination, and the preclearance requirement was not enacted to authorize covered jurisdictions to pour old poison into new bottles. See post, at 374-376 (Breyer, J., dissenting). Beer was
Page: Index Previous 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007