Opinion of the Court
determine whether [racial] discrimination existed …: Whether such discrimination existed.” It’s Results That Count, Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 3, 1982, p. 8–A.
But Mobile had its defenders, too. In their view, abandoning the intent test in favor of an effects test would inevitably require a focus on proportionality—wherever a minority group won fewer seats in the legislature than its share of the population, the charge could be made that the State law had a discriminatory effect. That, after all, was the type of claim brought in Mobile. But mandating racial proportionality in elections was regarded by many as intolerable. Doing so, wrote Senator Orrin Hatch in the Washington Star, would be “strongly resented by the American public.” Washington Star, Sept. 30, 1980, p. A–9. The Wall Street Journal offered similar criticism. An effects test would generate “more, not less, racial and ethnic polarization.” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 19, 1982, p. 28.
This sharp debate arrived at Congress’s doorstep in 1981. The question whether to broaden §2 or keep it as is, said Hatch—by then Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee before which §2 would be debated—“involve[d] one of the most substantial constitutional issues ever to come before this body.” 2 Hearings before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 2d Sess., pt. 1, p. 1 (1982).
Proceedings in Congress mirrored the disagreement that had developed around the country. In April 1981, Congressman Peter W. Rodino, Jr.—longtime chairman of the House Judiciary Committee—introduced a bill to amend the VRA, proposing that the words “to deny or abridge” in §2 be replaced with the phrase “in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement.” H. R. 3112, 97th Cong., 1st Sess., 2 (as introduced) (emphasis added). This was the effects test that Mobile’s detractors sought.
But those wary of proportionality were not far behind. Senator Hatch argued that the effects test “was intelligible
