Voting Rights Act: A Question

Does anyone out there understand what the issue is with the Voting Rights Act?

It passed the House today, which is good, but it was voted against by a number of Southern Republicans, who made statements about it punishing their states for past offenses which have long since been remedied.

My first impression on reading that was to think "If you've fixed the problem, then it shouldn't be an issue whether correct behavior is codified in law or not".

But I got to thinking about it, and I have to think that the word "punishing" is far too strong for simply enacting a bill that criminalizes certain anti-democratic voting practices, so there must be more to it.

Is anyone who reads this regularly familiar with the details of the voting rights act? Is there some specific onus put upon the southern states whose misdeeds originally spawned the Act? Are there some continued reparations or costs those states are forced by this bill to bear?

I was incensed last week when it looked like Congress was going to try to quietly let the Voting Rights Act die, opening the door for a return to the days of poll taxes and voter registration tests containing such questions as "How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?" (an actual question used to "disqualify" black voters in the past).

But I have to think that there is no political gain for anyone in NOT passing a bill so fundamentally to the core principles of democracy, and so there has to be more to it than that, and everywhere I've looked, I've simply found people repeating the problems the Act was originally enacted to fix.

If you know more, please share! (Otherwise, I'll probably end up doing a batch of research on it this weekend).

Liam.