A query of THOMAS shows that on July 26, the day before the President signed VRA renewal into law, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report, No. 109-295, on S2703, the companion identical VRA bill that was not signed into law. The House version, H.R. 9, was the one approved by the Senate and signed by the president. The committee report is not yet online, at least not anywhere I can find it. CQ Daily (sorry, I don’t have a link to this subscription only report) tonight sent out a story, “Senate Democrats Suggest Republicans Tried to Undercut Voting Rights Act,” which notes that Democrats believe the committee’s report “would provide ammunition for future legal challenges against the 1965 law.” Nine of the 10 Republicans on the committee (including Sen. Specter but not Senator DeWine) signed the report. “In a statement, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member complained that Democrats did not see the final version of the report before it was filed and had not received a copy of it since.”
Someone earlier sent me what appears to be a draft of the majority report, and a separate portion of the report from Sens. Cornyn and Coburn. At least the draft I saw raised serious constitutional questions about renewal. The main report too, though more subtly, raised those questions, for example, by citing detailed minority turnout figures in covered jurisdictions that exceeded rates of White turnout.
We’ll have to wait for an official copy of the report to judge it further. It is also a report issued after the fact, so that it is not clear how much weight in interpretation it would play should disputes come up. (CQ reports, and I saw this on the draft sent to me, reports that “Republicans John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Coburn or Oklahoma preface their ‘additional views’ filed with the report by saying, ‘We regret that these views will be filed post enactment. The expedited process prohibited normal order.'”)
But whether or not a court would afford the same kind of deference to this legislative history is besides the point. Its main purpose is to signal to the Supreme Court (and to constituents) that, in the views of at least some Republican Senators, a full debate on the merits and constitutionality of renewal was not undertaken by Congress. That’s a message that could well resonate with some of the conservative Justices on the Court, though it would have even without the committee report.