Court Opinion

ID: 9427324
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:20:24.400852+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:06.192641
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
with whom Mr. Justice Marshall joins,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion. The Court is surely correct that the District Court committed reversible error by not, at the very least, ordering the Peach County officials to seek pre-clearance of the voting change enforced in the 1976 election and affording appellants the opportunity, if prior approval is not granted, to seek an order that would cut short the terms of the two Commissioners elected in 1976 and require a new election under the pre-1968 law. The District Court manifestly erred in refusing to order such relief on the basis of its conclusion that the change was “rather technical” with no “apparent discriminatory purpose or effect.” Nothing could be clearer than that a district court — other, of course, than the District Court for the District of Columbia- — has no jurisdiction to assess the purpose or effect of any voting change. See, e. g., United States v. Board of Supervisors, 429 U. S. 642 (1977); Perkins v. Matthews, 400 U. S. 379, 385 (1971).
Although the Court does not reach this issue, I think it clear *194that, if the Peach County officials do not hereafter obtain federal preclearance for the 1968 change, the District Court must order a new election for all three posts at the earliest feasible time— that here being the regularly scheduled 1978 election. For if a designated federal entity cannot hereafter approve the 1968 voting change as racially neutral, it follows necessarily that there is a substantial probability that the 1976 election itself perpetrated racial discrimination in voting. To permit the results of the 1976 election to stand in the face of such a determination would be to do precisely what § 5 was designed to forbid: allow the burdens of litigation and delay to operate in favor of the perpetrators and against the victims of possibly racially discriminatory practices. See South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 335 (1966).
However, while I, therefore, agree that the* District Court committed reversible error, I am also of the view that, in the circumstances of this case, a strong argument can be made that, whether or not preclearance can be obtained, the only sufficient remedy is to set aside the 1976 election and order a new election under the pre-1968 law. Here, the Peach County officials could not have reasonably believed at the time of the 1976 election that the 1968 voting change could continue to be validly enforced without obtaining prior federal approval; thus the situation is quite different from that present in cases like Perkins v. Matthews, supra, where the scope of the § 5 duty had been unsettled at the time of the election that was under attack.
If, in cases like the present one, the remedy of ordering a new election is not to be required in all cases, the political units covered by § 5 may have a positive incentive flagrantly to disregard their clear obligations and not to seek preclearance of proposed voting changes. For covered jurisdictions will then know that a § 5 violation, if a suit is brought, can only result in their being denied the right to continue to enforce those voting changes that could not have received federal approval in the *195first place. As to all other voting changes, the sole effect of a suit for noncompliance with the approval provisions will be the limited sanction of requiring the political unit to obtain the federal approval which it should have received before any change was instituted.
The legislative background of § 5 strongly suggests to me that Congress expressly intended to preclude such a state of affairs. Section 5, of course, was intended to prevent those States which had a history of racial discrimination in voting from adhering to their long-established practices of continually contriving new laws to deprive blacks of any newly won voting rights. Congress sought to place the burden of inertia and litigation delay on the perpetrators of the discrimination by requiring affected States voluntarily to submit any new law affecting voting for federal approval before it became effective. The remedial theory the Court embraces today may retard, not further, the objective of having polities voluntarily comply with § 5, for a possible consequence may well be that a very large share of the burden of implementing federal policy will be placed on public and private enforcement. We ought to have the benefit of full briefing and oral argument to help indicate whether this will be the case.
I do not regard Perkins v. Matthews, supra, as necessarily supporting the Court’s decision. While it is true that the Court there stated that there might be circumstances in which it would be appropriate to order a new election only if federal approval for the voting change were not procured within a specified time period, 400 U. S., at 396, the context of this statement clearly suggests that it is intended to apply only to cases in which it had not been reasonably clear at the time of the election that the change was covered by § 5. Ibid*
*196However, since there is no disposition on the part of my colleagues to note probable jurisdiction and set the case down for oral argument, I join the Court’s opinion.

 I recognize that the case involves a voting change first implemented in 1968. This fact does not, however, necessarily support the Court’s decision. Since the duty to comply with § 5 is a continuing one and applied to Peach County’s enforcement of the 1968 change in the 1976 election, *196a strong argument can be made that the only relevant consideration should be that the § 5 duty was clear in 1976.