The longest 'emergency': congress debates (sort of) the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

IN mid-June, a relatively small number of House Republicans persuaded their leaders to delay a floor vote on a bill officially called "The Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006."

California Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters was furious, which is not unprecedented. "The notion that a handful of Republicans from southern states can rally enough support to hijack reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act is a slap in the face to the civil-rights pioneers after which this legislation is named," she said. "This delay is inexcusable." She added that Republicans have a "moral obligation," "out of respect" for those three women, to pass the bill immediately, "without amendments."

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, agreed: "The renewal of the Voting Rights Act has broad bipartisan support and should not be held hostage by congressional Republicans pandering to the far Right of their party."

Some journalists piled on. When Rep. John Carter, a Texas Republican, suggested that the Voting Rights Act should be amended so as not to force states and localities to print ballots in foreign languages, the Austin American Statesman editorialized that he had "blurt[ed] out embarrassing comments." It lamented that such "historically illiterate griping stopped cold a vote to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act for another 25 years."

Actually, much of the Voting Rights Act is permanent law and doesn't have to be renewed. It's the "emergency" sections of the act that are up for reauthorization. When Congress wrote the act, many southern states were engaged in extraordinary efforts to deny black citizens their Fifteenth Amendment right to vote. Congress therefore authorized extraordinary federal interventions for five years. But the deadline was extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982--in that last case, for 25 years.

Dean is right to say that another 25-year extension has "broad bipartisan support." President Bush, Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Speaker Denny Hastert, and the chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees--Arlen Specter and James Sensenbrenner, respectively--are on board, as are almost all Democrats. The House Judiciary Committee voted 33-1 for the extension. Sensenbrenner wants the full House to vote on the committee's version of the bill without being free to offer amendments.

The renegade Republicans who have Waters and Dean so exercised are not trying to get rid of the Voting Rights Act. They are, in the main, objecting to two specific provisions of the act. The first, as mentioned, is the act's requirement that some states and localities print ballots in languages other than English. Since immigrants are supposed to have English proficiency to become citizens, many congressmen think that it serves no good purpose to print ballots in other languages, let alone to require it. If they cannot eliminate this requirement altogether, they want at least to allow localities that have not had many requests for foreign-language ballots in recent elections to stop printing them.

Not all of the congressmen who want to loosen this requirement are southerners, as Waters suggested. Their leader is Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, who thinks it odd that something called the "Voting Rights Act" should be debated without congressmen having the chance to vote to modify it. He is the one member of the House Judiciary Committee who voted against the act's extension.

The second provision requires officials in several "covered jurisdictions," mostly in the South, to get "pre-clearance" from the Justice Department before they change any of their election laws or procedures. This requirement is a practical burden, since it means that moving a voting booth a block may have to wait on federal approval. Some southern congressmen also take it as an insult.

Lynn Westmoreland, a freshman Republican congressman from Georgia, has led the charge against this provision. A trio of think-tankers has provided intellectual support for him: Abigail Thernstrom (the Manhattan Institute), Ed Blum (the American Enterprise Institute), and Roger Clegg (the Center for Equal Opportunity). They point out that the covered jurisdictions show no sign of treating black and Hispanic voters less fairly than other jurisdictions. In Georgia, a covered state, blacks are more likely than whites to register to vote and to vote. Liberals today tend to think that a felon, having spent his time in jail, deserves to regain the right to vote. But they don't think that after 40 years Georgia should regain the ability to set its own election rules. Indeed, Clegg and the others argue that Congress is exceeding its constitutional powers by continuing to single out such states.

Jeff Lungren, a spokesman for Sensenbrenner, defends the law by noting that it is possible for a jurisdiction to work with the Justice Department to end its covered status. Eleven counties in Virginia have done that since the 1982 reauthorization. Georgia's problem is that it keeps submitting election-law changes that don't pass muster. The Justice Department has objected to the state's proposed changes 91 times since 1982--more times, Lungren points out, than it objected to proposed changes between 1965 and 1982.

Those data can, however, be read in more than one way. If only eleven counties have escaped the Justice Department in 25 years, maybe the standards for doing so are too high. Does anyone believe that those counties have changed dramatically more than the rest of the South? For that matter, does anyone believe that Georgia treats black voters worse over the last 25 years than it did over the previous 17?

Charlie Norwood, another Republican congressman from Georgia, is trying to amend the act. Most of the covered states got that way because of their statistics on minority voting in 1964. He wants to determine which jurisdictions are covered based on the last three elections, and continually update the list. Westmoreland says that his state shouldn't be "in the penalty box for 66 years, with no hope for a reprieve."

Many of the Republicans who favor extending the act, with no floor amendments, are just afraid of being called racist or, what amounts to the same thing, "against the Voting Rights Act." Other Republicans, however, believe that the law has benefited them and will keep doing so. In the 1990s, the act was used to pack black voters into congressional districts so as to elect black candidates (and to pack Hispanic voters into districts so as to elect Hispanics). These "majority minority" districts have been overwhelmingly Democratic. Creating them, by concentrating Democratic voters, has reduced the total number of Democratic-leaning districts. Congressman Tom Feeney, a Florida Republican, says that the Voting Rights Act was as important as the Contract with America in giving his party control of Congress, and that it remains vital. This is a reasonable assessment.

This racial gerrymandering has also made congressional elections less competitive. It has contributed to the racial polarization of the parties, keeping Republican House members from representing many black or Hispanic voters and keeping such voters from being able to vote for many viable Republican candidates for House seats. It has also made it harder for minority candidates to develop the multiracial followings necessary to win statewide office.

The Supreme Court has struggled to interpret the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause so as to be consistent with each other. In Georgia v. Ashcroft, a 2003 case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote a characteristically muddled decision for the Court. The ruling gave state legislatures more leeway in drawing lines for congressional districts.

They had previously been required to maximize the number of minority officeholders who were likely to be elected, or at least to keep that number from falling. O'Connor's ruling allows legislatures to create districts with large minorities of black (or Hispanic, or Asian) voters. Those voters could combine with some white voters to elect their favored candidates. That way, black voters might end up having more influence over the government.

O'Connor thus, to her credit, moved away from the pernicious idea that only black officeholders can represent black voters. But she moved closer to the idea that only liberals, be they white or black, can represent black voters. Think about how this would work in practice. Let's say an election put Democrats in charge of what was normally a Republican state, and they enacted a gerrymander that locked their power in place. A Democratic gerrymander would almost certainly increase the total number of districts that were dominated either by black voters or by a combination of blacks and white liberals. O'Connor's rules would be no obstacle to such a plan. But when the Republicans had a chance to redraw the lines, the rules would be a nearly insuperable obstacle. Any redistricting plan of theirs would reduce minority influence.

In other words, O'Connor's decision gave legislatures added leeway only to help Democrats. It would put the federal government in the position of putting a thumb on the scales in favor of Democratic redistricters.

Top Republican officials think that the Georgia v. Ashcroft rules could eventually cost their party 10-20 House seats. So even if the Voting Rights Act has helped Republicans in the past, there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. The Republican supporters of extending the act's expiring provisions think that they contain language that heads off this threat. They're wrong. Both the text and the legislative history of the act suggest that it enshrines, rather than eliminates, the double standard on partisan gerrymanders.

The bill will thus promote the racial balkanization of the electorate without helping the Republican party. A Senate Republican aide sums it up: "When you're cutting a deal with the devil, you'd better be damned clear on the terms of the deal."

Mr. Ponnuru is an NR senior editor and the author of Party of Death, available from Regnery.