Consider the story of a hypothetical congressional district in a hypothetical State, subjected to a redistricting scheme. The example is admittedly stylized, but in its essence simulates the dispute before us, and clarifies the immense issues at stake. The district, let’s say, is a single county, in the shape of a near-perfect circle, sitting in the middle of a rectangular State. The State is one with a long history of virulent racial discrimination, and its many effects, including in residential segregation and political division, remain significant even today. The population of the circle district is 90% Black; the rest of the State, divided into five surrounding districts, is 90% White. And voting throughout all those districts is racially polarized: Black residents vote heavily for Democratic candidates, while White residents vote heavily for Republicans. The circle district thus enables the State’s Black community to elect a representative of its choice, whom no neighboring community would put in office. But that arrangement, in this not-so-hypothetical, is not to last. The state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts. The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted. That is racial vote dilution in its most classic form. A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split—“cracked” is the usual term—so that it loses all its electoral influence. Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests. Their votes matter less than others’ do; they translate into less political voice. Or, as this Court put it recently, the cracking makes “a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.” Allen v. Milligan, 599 U. S. 1, 25 (2023). And because that is so, Congress in the Voting Rights Act made the practice illegal. Section 2 of that Act guarantees that members of every racial group have an equal “opportunity” to “elect representatives of their choice.” 52 U. S. C. §10301(b). That promise arose from a far-too-prominent part of this Nation’s history.
Even after the Fifteenth Amendment banned racial discrimination in voting, state officials routinely deprived African Americans of their voting rights. Through a seemingly boundless array of mechanisms—most of them facially race-neutral and among them the drawing of district lines—States either prevented Black citizens from casting ballots or ensured that their votes would count for next to nothing. The Voting Rights Act was meant as the corrective. And when this Court construed it too narrowly—insisting that a person suing under Section 2 had to prove discriminatory intent—Congress amended the law so that it turned solely on discriminatory effects. Under that revised version, a person has a good Section 2 claim if the challenged state action, in the “totality of circumstances,” “results in” an electoral system “not equally open” to members of his racial group—meaning a system giving those citizens “less opportunity” to “participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” §10301 (emphasis added). And for 40 years now, this Court has recognized that language to encompass districting decisions that, in the way illustrated above, result in vote dilution—the “minimiz[ing]” of minority voters’ “ability to elect their preferred candidates.” Allen, 599 U. S., at 18 (quoting Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30, 48 (1986)).
But no longer. Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be “updat[ing]” our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. Ante, at 26, 29, 32. But in fact, those “updates” eviscerate the law, so that it will not remedy even the classic example of vote dilution given above. Without a basis in Section 2’s text or the Constitution, the majority formulates new proof requirements for plaintiffs alleging vote dilution. Those demands, meant to “disentangle race from politics,” ante, at 25, leverage two features of modern political life: that racial identity and party preference are often linked and that politicians have free rein to adopt partisan gerrymanders. The first fact—say, that in a given area, Black voters mainly support Democrats and White voters Republicans—was viewed before today as practically an element of a vote-dilution claim, because it indicates that a minority group is politically cohesive enough to elect a preferred representative but will be outvoted by the majority bloc. See Allen, 599 U. S., at 18, 22. The second fact—the result of a prior mistake by this Court—is something every day to regret, not to use as an excuse for stripping minority citizens of their voting rights. But under the majority’s new test, when those two facts coexist—which is almost everywhere Section 2 still has purchase—a plaintiff cannot prevail by showing that a redistricting resulted in the dilution of minority voting power. Rather, a plaintiff will have to show—contrary to Section 2’s clear text and design—that the legislators were “motivated by a discriminatory purpose.” Ante, at 23 (emphasis added). And that, as Section 2’s drafters knew, is well-nigh impossible. Today’s ruling is part of a set: For over a decade, this Court has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the Court made a nullity of Section 5, the provision of the Act enabling the Department of Justice to review and block new voting rules—including redistrictings—in jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression. See Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U. S. 529 (2013). Congress had recently, and after lengthy study, reauthorized that preclearance mechanism. It found the scheme still essential to counter the protean techniques States can use to prevent minorities from exercising their fair share of political influence. But this Court thought it knew better. “[T]hings have changed dramatically,” the Court explained, id., at 547, ignoring that whether things had changed dramatically enough to make the law dispensable was a question better left to its democratically accountable authors. Not surprisingly, a flood of discriminatory voting laws followed, and now only Section 2 stood in the gap. In 2021, the Court did half what was needed to raze that section too. See Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U. S. 647 (2021). Section 2 prohibits not only vote-diluting districting plans, but also discriminatory burdens on the casting of ballots. In a suit involving the latter type of law, the Court invented a new legal standard making Section 2 useless, on the theory that the statute as written was too “radical.” See id., at 674. Since the Court ruled, not a single Section 2 suit has successfully challenged such a restriction on voting, however discriminatory in operation. See R. Hasen, The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U. S. Election Law, 134 Yale L. J. 1673, 1686 (2025).
And finally, today, the last piece—Section 2 as applied to redistricting. The last, and surely the hardest, for just three Terms ago the Court upheld a vote-dilution challenge to a districting map in a case much like this one—preserving Section 2 as a tool to prevent racially discriminatory redistricting. See Allen, 599 U. S., at 17. “[W]e decline to adopt,” the Court said then, “an interpretation of §2 that would revise and reformulate” our “§2 jurisprudence [of] nearly forty years.” Id., at 26. Nothing has changed in the three years since. Yet today, the majority does “revise and reformulate” . . . and destroy. It avails itself again of the tools used before to dismantle the Act: untenable readings of statutory text, made-up and impossible-to-meet evidentiary requirements, disregard for precedent, and disdain for congressional judgment. And in that way it greenlights redistricting plans that will disable minority communities— in Louisiana and across the Nation—from electing, as majority communities can, “representatives of their choice.” §10301(b). What if the districts in which minority citizens exercise voting power are sliced up, and the pieces appended to districts in which they can play no meaningful role? The majority tells us that the inability to make out a Section 2 claim will just be a mark of the Nation’s progress, and therefore “cause for celebration.” Ante, at 31. I dissent. The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—“one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.” Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 562 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.
I
I begin with some history—both with what led originally to the Voting Rights Act and with how the current Section 2 came to be. The point is not to deliver a eulogy for the law—though, in truth, the Court’s step-by-step slaying of voting rights now makes one appropriate. Rather, the object is to reveal how far today’s decision repudiates past, and rightfully still controlling, congressional choices. As I’ll later explain, the majority now demands that vote-dilution plaintiffs muster proof of racially discriminatory motive. See infra, at 23–32. In that way, the decision echoes an earlier one of this Court, which also held that Section 2 should function as an intent test. See Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55 (1980). But Congress, as you’ll soon see, amended Section 2 to reject that view: In light of the way voting discrimination had operated since the Fifteenth Amendment’s adoption, Congress instead drafted Section 2 to bar the use of any electoral mechanism that would result in minority citizens having less opportunity than non-minority citizens to choose their political representatives.
A
In the wake of the Civil War, Congress enacted and the States ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, to ensure the enfranchisement of Black Americans. Nearly 200,000 Black men had fought in the Union cause: “[W]hen the fight is over,” General Sherman counseled, “the hand that drops the musket cannot be denied the ballot.” See A. Keyssar, The Right to Vote 69 (rev. ed. 2009) (Keyssar). And millions more African Americans had just become citizens, giving them a claim on political rights. The Fifteenth Amendment responded with a clarion promise of racial equality in voting: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The Amendment’s passage was a momentous occasion. It appeared to affirm that a mere few years after slavery’s end, African Americans had become “equal members of the body politic.” E. Foner, The Second Founding 111 (2019) (Foner). President Grant, in a message to Congress, called the Amendment “the most important event that has occurred since the nation came to life.” Ibid. Black Americans similarly referred to the Amendment as the Nation’s “second birth.” Ibid. At one of the many celebrations ratification sparked, Frederick Douglass rejoiced that those just released from bondage were now “placed upon an equal footing with all other men”: “Never,” he declared, “was revolution more complete.” Keyssar 82; Foner 112.
But all the hosannas were many years premature: “In the century that followed,” the Fifteenth Amendment “proved little more than a parchment promise.” Allen, 599 U. S., at 10. Violence and intimidation were ever-present ways to deny Black citizens their right to vote. But often force was not needed, because state laws could well enough accomplish that goal. Especially in the South, States soon put in place a host of facially race-neutral devices to systematically disenfranchise African American citizens. Poll taxes, literacy tests, “good character” exams, property qualifications, convoluted registration processes—all these and more, when combined with administrative discretion, effectively suppressed the Black vote, without much affecting the White one. See South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 311 (1966). Congress could have acted: the Fifteenth Amendment gave it the “power to enforce” minority voting rights “by appropriate legislation.” But for decades it sat mute while facially race-neutral voting rules succeeded in “render[ing] the right to vote illusory” for Black Americans. Allen, 599 U. S., at 10. Louisiana’s post-Reconstruction rules, to cite the most pertinent example, took less than a decade to drive the number of Black registered voters from 130,000 (in 1896) to 1,342 (in 1904). See Keyssar 91. The numbers did not begin to climb until the end of World War II (when Black soldiers returned from other battlefields), and even then only slowly. See 1 U. S. Commission on Civil Rights Report 42 (1961).
Congress’s initial efforts to counter voting discrimination—in the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964—did little but prove the difficulty of the task. Each of those statutes authorized the Attorney General “to seek injunctions against public and private interference with the right to vote on racial grounds.” Katzenbach, 383 U. S., at 313. But time and again, States found ways to evade the ensuing court orders. They “merely switched to discriminatory devices not covered by” the court decrees, finding yet new race-neutral rules (there seemed an endless number) that would maintain the disparity between White and Black voting power. Id., at 314. Congress thus learned of the “unremitting and ingenious” methods States could use to resist African American enfranchisement. Id., at 309. Protecting minority voting was like “battling the Hydra”: “Whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.” Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 560 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented Congress’s most determined effort to stop the cycle. Selma’s Bloody Sunday had galvanized the Nation to finally confront racial disfranchisement.
Now Congress enacted legislation making use of a double-barreled approach to ensure the Fifteenth Amendment’s enforcement. Section 5 of the Act required that States or localities with a history of racial voter suppression obtain Department of Justice approval before implementing new voting districts or rules. An administrative review process thus would impede—at least, until this Court in Shelby County stopped it—the ever-inventive efforts of certain jurisdictions to deny or minimize minority voting. Meantime, Section 2 provided judicial recourse for victims of voting discrimination in all jurisdictions. That provision prohibited any election rule or practice that would “deny or abridge” the right to vote, thus imposing a “permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting” (or so the Court assured the country when disabling Section 5). 42 U. S. C. §1973 (1970); Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 557. Taken together, Congress thought, the two mechanisms could “forever banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting”—effectively countering States’ constantly morphing methods of suppressing minority ballots. Allen, 599 U. S., at 10.
B
After the Act’s passage—and partly because of its initial success—those methods more and more focused on vote dilution. The Act led to a large increase in minority voting registration: In just five years, almost as many African Americans registered to vote in six Southern States as in the entire century before 1965. See C. Davidson, The Voting Rights Act, in Controversies in Minority Voting 21 (B. Grofman & C. Davidson eds. 1992). And the Act mostly halted state efforts to prevent those new voters from casting ballots at all. So the States, as Congress noted when reauthorizing Section 5 in 1975, “resorted to [measures] which would dilute increasing minority voting strength.” City of Rome v. United States, 446 U. S. 156, 181 (1980) (quoting H. R. Rep. No. 94–196, pp. 10–11 (1975)). Efforts to minimize minorities’ voting power took several forms. One was to use at-large voting. A majority-White municipality, for example, might exclude all African Americans from its city council by scrapping geographic districts in favor of citywide elections. See Perkins v. Matthews, 400 U. S. 379, 389 (1971). Another common dilution mechanism was just to redraw single-member districts. Minority citizens could be “packed”: A racial community large enough to constitute a majority in two normal districts—and therefore capable of electing two representatives—might be crammed into a single district instead. See Voinovich v. Quilter, 507 U. S. 146, 153–154 (1993). Or else minority citizens could be “cracked,” as in the hypothetical introducing this opinion. See supra, at 1–2. Then, voters would be dispersed across multiple districts so they could not muster a majority in any. See Voinovich, 507 U. S., at 153. In either event, a minority citizen’s vote would “carry less weight than” it did previously or than it would “in another, hypothetical district.” Gill v. Whitford, 585 U. S. 48, 67 (2018). This Court soon held, in White v. Regester, 412 U. S. 755 (1973), that such practices could be unlawful because of their effects—more specifically, because they result in unequal electoral opportunities for minority citizens. (Attend closely here, because White becomes the template for the current version of Section 2.) The plaintiffs in White challenged a Texas districting scheme that established multi- member districts in two counties with concentrated urban populations, even while using single-member districts nearly everywhere else. The effect of the scheme, the plaintiffs charged, was to “minimize the voting strength of racial groups”—both African Americans and Mexican Americans—by putting them in a broad county-wide district in which their votes would be swamped. Id., at 765, 767. In addressing that claim, the Court initially stated that it was “not enough” to show that the districting scheme prevented the minority groups from achieving proportional representation—legislative seats in proportion to their population. Id., at 765. But that did not mean that the plaintiffs had to show that the State had acted with discriminatory intent. Rather, the Court held, the plaintiffs could prevail on a different kind of showing that a scheme’s effect was to “minimize the voting strength of racial groups.” Ibid. Under the Court’s test, there was unlawful vote dilution if “the political process[]” was “not equally open to participation” by a racial group, so that “its members had less opportunity” than others “to participate in the political processes and to elect legislators of their choice.” Id., at 766. The Court in White found that test satisfied under a “totality of the circumstances” inquiry, which looked to how the multi-member districting scheme operated when “overlaid” on historical, social, and political “realities.” Id., at 769. As part of that analysis, the Court noted the “history of official racial discrimination in Texas” and the persistent use of “racial campaign tactics” in elections. Id., at 766– 767. But beyond such intentional race-based action, the Court looked to how the current or “residual” effects of past discrimination, including disparities in matters like housing, “education [and] employment,” had political consequences. Id., at 768. Similarly, with respect to Mexican Americans, the Court considered evidence of “cultural and language barrier[s]” to political participation. Ibid. And finally, the Court homed in on political data itself, including voter registration and the infrequent election of Black or Hispanic candidates in majority-White districts. See id., at 766, 768–769. When all those factors were combined—in what the Court called “an intensely local appraisal”—the “impact” of the multi-member districts clearly emerged: Those districts denied minority voters equal “access to the political process[],” “specifically in the election of [state] representatives.” Id., at 767–769.1 Just seven years later, however, the Court did an about- face, now requiring a showing of discriminatory intent to succeed on a vote-dilution claim. In City of Mobile v. Bol den, the plaintiffs challenged an at-large election system for a three-member city commission. Under that system, Mobile’s Black population, which made up 35% of the total, had never managed to elect a candidate of its choice. But the Court did not embark on the kind of analysis employed in White to determine whether the system diluted Black votes. Instead, the Court’s controlling opinion held that Section 2 merely “restated the prohibitions” of the Fifteenth Amendment, which barred only intentional discrimination. 446 U. S., at 61 (plurality opinion); see id., at 62–65. And the plaintiffs had produced no evidence of discriminatory motive. They could, the Court noted (as though it were the end of the matter), “register and vote without hindrance.” Id., at 65. That their chosen candidates happened to always lose was beside the point. Because they could not show that the city had “purposeful[ly] exclu[ded]” them “from participati[ng] in the election process,” the Court held, they had no viable Section 2 suit. Id., at 64 (emphasis added); see Allen, 599 U. S., at 11 (similarly describing Bolden). Bolden, as the majority notes, triggered “an avalanche of criticism, both in the media and within the civil rights community.” Ante, at 5 (quoting Allen, 599 U. S., at 11). This Court recently noted a few of the assessments. “[T]he biggest step backwards in civil rights” to come from the Court since the Voting Rights Act’s passage. Allen, 599 U. S., at 11 (quoting N. Y. Times, Apr. 23, 1980, p. A22). And a “major defeat for blacks and other minorities fighting electoral schemes that exclude them from office.” Allen, 599 U. S., at 11–12 (quoting Washington Post, Apr. 23, 1980, p. A5). The problem, as even the majority recognizes, was “that a focus on discriminatory intent, rather than discriminatory effects, would defeat worthy claims because of the difficulty of proving intentional discrimination.” Ante, at 5. It is the rare legislature, as the history of voting discrimination shows, that cannot camouflage racial targeting with race-neutral justifications. For that reason, Bolden brought vote-dilution claims to a near-standstill. The Department of Justice shelved the dilution cases it had intended to bring; and private plaintiffs filed just 10 such suits in the next year, compared with 60 the year before. See A. Berman, Give Us the Ballot 135 (2015). States, it seemed, could make minority votes meaningless without ever running into the Voting Rights Act.
But then Congress stepped in, to reverse Bolden’s intent requirement—and create the statute existing today. The House began the process with a simple change to Section 2’s text. It replaced the words “to deny or abridge” with the phrase “in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of,” to make the section look like this: “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” §10301(a) (emphasis added).
But a Senate subcommittee led by Senator Orrin Hatch objected. It thought the House’s amendment would always require racially proportional representation, and advocated keeping Section 2—as construed by Bolden—just as it was. The impasse was resolved by Senator Bob Dole in the Judiciary Committee, through the addition of a subsection codifying the White decision. Recall that White had rejected proportional representation as the standard for vote-dilution claims. See supra, at 10–11. Now Senator Dole—while retaining the House’s “results in” language—added a provision to do the same thing. See §10301(b) (“[N]othing in this section establishes a right to have members of a [racial group] elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population”). And yet more important for present purposes, Senator Dole took language from White to clarify when a State would violate the ban on electoral rules that “result[] in a denial or abridgement” of voting. A violation is established, the Dole (but really the White) language stated, “if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a [racial group] in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” §10301(b).
That elaboration of when the effects of an electoral rule would cause a violation of Section 2 received bipartisan support. The amended Section 2 passed both the House and the Senate by huge majorities; and in June 1982, President Reagan signed it into law.
An “oft-cited” Senate Report explained just what the 1982 amendment had accomplished: The new Section 2 repudiated Bolden’s intent requirement and adopted White’s “results test.” Brnovich, 594 U. S., at 658; S. Rep. No. 97–417, p. 27 (1982) (Senate Report). An intent test, the Report stated, imposed “an inordinately difficult burden for plaintiffs.” Id., at 36. Even when state actors had purposefully discriminated, they would likely be “ab[le] to offer a nonracial rationalization,” supported by “a false trail” of “official resolutions” and “other legislative history eschewing any racial motive.” Id., at 37. The proof lay in what had happened after Bolden, when even suits involving “egregious” vote dilution had failed. Senate Report, at 37; see id., at 26–27, 37–39. And in any event, the Report continued, the Bolden intent test “ask[ed] the wrong question.” Senate Report, at 36. The right question was instead the one White—and now the statute—asked: “whether minorities have equal access to the process of electing their representatives.” Senate Report, at 36. In applying the new Section 2, the Report instructed, courts should “assess the impact of the challenged” practice based on “objective factors” to determine whether it worked to “minimize or cancel out the voting strength and political effectiveness of minority groups.” Id., at 27–28.
The Senate Report also noted this Court’s holdings recognizing Congress’s constitutional authority to focus the Section 2 standard on results. It is “hornbook law,” the Report explained, that the Fifteenth Amendment “grant[s] Congress broad power” to enact legislation “reasonably adapted to protect citizens against the risk” that their constitutional right to vote will be denied. Id., at 39–40 (citing Katzen bach, 383 U. S., at 326). So even though the Fifteenth Amendment itself barred only intentional discrimination, Congress could enact legislation extending to discriminatory effects. Indeed, the Report observed, this Court had held as much two years earlier, when it approved Section 5’s broad effects-based scope. Senate Report, at 40 (citing City of Rome, 446 U. S. 156). In Section 2 as well, proper enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment necessitated a results test. For one thing, voting rules with “discriminatory results perpetuate the effects of past purposeful discrimination.” Senate Report, at 40. And anyway, the Report again emphasized, the difficulties of proving motive would “create a substantial risk that intentional discrimination” would go “undetected, uncorrected and undeterred.” Ibid. So Congress made a choice that was “as considered as considered comes”: to ensure that “results alone could lead to liability” under Section 2. Brnovich, 594 U. S., at 703 (KAGAN, J., dissenting). Congress in 1982 knew all about this Nation’s history of racially discriminatory voting practices. It knew that even when States could no longer deny ballots to minority citizens, they might still try to give their votes no or minimal weight. And Congress knew that those efforts did not come tagged as race-based. To the contrary, they were race-neutral on their face, and likewise were publicly backed by race-neutral justifications. So Congress renounced, as strongly as it could, Bolden’s decision to limit Section 2’s ban to intentional discrimination. It made sure instead, as this Court recently explained, that Section 2 would “turn[] on the presence of discriminatory effects.” Al len, 599 U. S., at 25; see id., at 44 (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring in part) (“[T]he text of §2 establishes an effects test, not an intent test”). And more precisely, that the section would turn on whether, given all relevant circumstances, an electoral rule would leave minority voters with “less opportunity” than non-minority voters to “elect representatives of their choice.” §10301(b).
There is a way to decide this case consistent with that fully permissible congressional choice, and a way not. In the next part, I show how 40 years’ worth of this Court’s caselaw would address the vote-dilution claim involved here. After that, I address what today’s majority does.2
II
This Court first construed the amended Section 2 in Thornburg v. Gingles, establishing there a framework—like the new statute itself—based on White. That framework has governed vote-dilution claims for the last four decades. And indeed, just three years ago, in Allen, we unequivocally reaffirmed it when sustaining a vote-dilution challenge to an Alabama redistricting scheme. See 599 U. S., at 19–23. Had we proceeded along the same road today, we would have treated the vote-dilution challenge to Louisiana’s scheme in the same way.
“Gingles began,” as Allen recently noted, “by describing what §2 guards against.” 599 U. S., at 17. “The essence of a §2 claim,” Gingles explained, is that an electoral rule or practice “interacts with social and historical conditions,” generally caused by past intentional discrimination, “to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by black and white voters.” 478 U. S., at 47. Such an inequality exists when the challenged rule “operates to minimize or cancel out [minority voters’] ability to elect their preferred candidates.”
Id., at 48.
And the risk of that “minimiz[ation]”—or dilution—is greatest when “minority and majority voters consistently prefer different candidates” and the minority voters are submerged in a majority voting population that “regularly defeat[s] [their] choices.” Ibid.; see Allen, 599 U. S., at 17–18.3 To get at that issue, Gingles initially requires a Section 2 plaintiff asserting vote dilution to satisfy three “preconditions.” 478 U. S., at 50. First, the minority group allegedly harmed must be “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district”—meaning, one “comport[ing] with traditional districting criteria.” Allen, 599 U. S., at 18 (alteration omitted). Second, the identified minority group must be “politically cohesive,” meaning that its members mainly vote for the same parties or candidates. Gingles, 478 U. S., at 51. And third, the majority in the district must “vote[] sufficiently as a bloc to enable it . . . usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” Ibid. Those three factors, taken together, serve a gatekeeping function. They permit a vote-dilution suit to proceed only if a plaintiff can show that minority voters would elect a “representative of [their] own choice” in some reasonably drawn electoral district, but that racially polarized voting in the district as actually drawn will usually “impede[] [their] ability” to do so. Allen, 599 U. S., at 18; Gingles, 478 U. S., at 51.
That threshold test is not easily met. To satisfy the first factor, a plaintiff will have to suggest alternative districting plans complying with such traditional criteria as compactness, contiguity, and respect for geographic boundaries and political subdivisions. And as Allen recently described, the inability to offer such substitute maps has doomed a good many vote-dilution suits. See 599 U. S., at 27–29 (citing Shaw v. Reno, 509 U. S. 630 (1993); Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900 (1995); Bush v. Vera, 517 U. S. 952 (1996); Abbott v. Perez, 585 U. S. 579 (2018)). Similarly, to satisfy the second and third conditions, the plaintiff must show the existence of racially polarized voting, generally through “statistical evidence of historic voting patterns.” League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U. S. 399, 500 (2006) (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). It is never enough in a Section 2 suit to rely on “assumptions” about how individuals will “vote based on their ethnic [or racial] background.” Ibid. Instead, “plaintiffs must prove” racial bloc voting. Gingles, 478 U. S., at 46. Given those requirements—and the steady decline in both residential segregation and racially polarized voting, which make them harder to meet—only strong vote-dilution claims can today get out of the gate. See Brief for Ellen D. Katz et al. as Amici Curiae 7–8 (Katz Brief ); Allen, 599 U. S., at 26–29; infra, at 43–44.
And beyond Gingles’s preconditions lies the “totality of circumstances” inquiry that migrated from White to Section 2’s text. §10301(b); see supra, at 14–15. To find, under that test, that the political process is not “equally open” to minority voters, a court must make (so Gingles held, lifting from White) “an intensely local appraisal” of how the challenged electoral rule operates against the backdrop of “past and present [racial] realit[ies].” §10301(b); Gingles, 478 U. S., at 79; see White, 412 U. S., at 769. The “objective factors” to be considered include the State’s “history of voting- related discrimination,” its experience of “racial appeals in political campaigns,” and its track record of electing minority citizens to office. Gingles, 478 U. S., at 44–45; see White, 412 U. S., at 769; Senate Report, at 28–29. So too, the inquiry may involve appraising the “effects of past discrimination” on economic and social conditions that “hinder [minority citizens’] ability to participate effectively in the political process.” Gingles, 478 U. S., at 45; see White, 412 U. S., at 768. Equally, though, the totality test weighs the strength of a “State’s interest in maintaining” a given electoral practice. Houston Lawyers’ Assn. v. Attorney General of Tex., 501 U. S. 419, 426 (1991). And the variety of matters to be assessed does nothing to detract from the test’s bite. By digging deep into local context, the totality inquiry implements Congress’s directive that a simple lack of proportional representation cannot make out a Section 2 claim. See Allen, 599 U. S., at 26–30. And when superimposed on Gingles’s threshold conditions, the test ensures that Section 2 will work as intended: to limit liability to cases where electoral rules in fact “deny minority voters equal opportunity” in the political process. Allen, 599 U. S., at 30 (alteration omitted).
Understood in that way, Allen explained just three years ago, “Gingles has governed our Voting Rights Act jurisprudence since it was decided.” Id., at 19. More: “Congress has never disturbed our understanding of §2 as Gingles construed it.” Ibid. And more: “[W]e have applied Gingles in one §2 case after another, to different kinds of electoral systems and to different jurisdictions in States all over the country.” Ibid. (citing no fewer than 10 Supreme Court decisions). And yes, still more, this time invoking “stare deci sis”: “[W]e decline to adopt an interpretation of §2 that would revise and reformulate” the Gingles framework “that has been the baseline of our §2 jurisprudence for nearly forty years.” Id., at 26, and n. 3. One might even have thought the matter settled. But see ante, at 1–37.4 In that settled view, a paradigmatic case of a Section 2 violation is the cracked-circle hypothetical opening this dissent. See supra, at 1–2. If you refresh your memory, you’ll instantly see why. The Black electorate could form—indeed, did form—a reasonably configured district: The circle in the middle of the State complies with traditional districting criteria of contiguity, compactness, and respect for political subdivisions. So Gingles’s first precondition is met. And the racially polarized voting in the State ensures that the second and third are met as well. The Black electorate within the circle and the White population surrounding it vote as blocs and for different candidates. So when the Black voters are dispersed among six predominantly White districts, they lose all their electoral influence. Or, as we recently described such a situation: Black voters have “the potential to elect a representative of [their] own choice in a possible district,” but “racially polarized voting prevents [them] from doing so in the district as actually drawn because [they are] submerged in a larger white voting population.” Cooper v. Harris, 581 U. S. 285, 302 (2017) (alteration omitted). That means a Section 2 suit will be decided based on the totality of the circumstances. And, as to that, I have posited facts making the inquiry straightforward: Recall that the hypothetical State has a long history of racial discrimination, which continues to show up, in manifold ways, in social conditions and political activity. So Section 2 (before today) would have stopped the hypothesized cracking plan and, in so doing, worked as Congress intended—to give Black voters no less a chance than their White neighbors to participate in the political process and elect their preferred representatives.
And my hypothetical is not so different from the Louisiana districting scheme that was challenged in the dilution suit underlying this case. It is just that instead of arguing about the need for one majority-minority district, the plaintiffs in that suit were asserting the need for a second. As the majority relates, Louisiana drew its post-2020 census map with one mainly Black district and five mainly White ones. See ante, at 11–12. (For context, Louisiana’s population is about one-third African American.) The dilution plaintiffs alleged that there was another natural (i.e., politically cohesive and geographically contiguous) Black-majority district which the Louisiana Legislature had effectively cracked. See ante, at 15 (showing the plaintiffs’ proposed district). The residents of that possible district wound up dispersed among the State’s other districts, where (given racially polarized voting) their preferences would count for nothing. According to the plaintiffs, that plan violated Section 2 by giving Black voters less opportunity than their White counterparts to elect representatives of their choice. Based on a voluminous record, including mountains of statistical data and five days of testimony, the District Court found that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail. See Robinson v. Ardoin, 605 F. Supp. 3d 759, 766 (MD La. 2022). Their proposed second district—in which Black voters could “easily” form a majority—was reasonably configured according to traditional districting criteria. Id., at 821; see id., at 827–831. And without that district, Black voters’ choices would be swamped: The evidence showed that as few as 12% of White voters in Louisiana would support Black-preferred candidates in statewide contests. Id., at 841–842. With the Gingles preconditions thus satisfied, the court assessed the totality of the circumstances and found that it, too, supported relief.
See, e.g., 605 F. Supp. 3d, at 845 (recounting, among other things, the State’s long history of racial discrimination, including that “Louisiana has never had a Black Congressperson elected from a non-majority-Black district”). And so the court ordered the State to draw a new map.
The court thus applied, in an altogether unexceptionable way, the framework used for the last 40 years to evaluate Section 2 vote-dilution claims. The court followed Gingles, along with the two fistfuls of this Court’s decisions affirming its framework. See supra, at 20–21. And most crucially, the court followed Section 2 itself, because all our prior decisions faithfully implemented the fundamental choice Congress made in amending that section: to make liability turn (as the Court did in White) not on the motives behind but on the “results” of an electoral practice like districting.
III
The majority today does just the opposite. Under the guise of “updat[ing]” the Gingles framework, ante, at 26, 29, 32, the majority transforms it—and in so doing, betrays Congress’s choice. At each of Gingles’s steps, the majority imposes new proof requirements, serving a common objective: to convert an effects test, as commanded by Congress, into a purpose test, as preferred by this Court. Nearly half a century ago, Congress amended Section 2 to repudiate Bolden’s limitation of that provision’s reach to intentional discrimination. See supra, at 13–16. Today’s decision returns Section 2 to what it was under Bolden. Now, as then, vote-dilution plaintiffs will have to show more than vote dilution: They will have to show, as well, race-based motive. Now, as then, that requirement will make success in their suits nearly impossible, even if an electoral practice has in fact “minimize[d] or cancel[ed] out” minority citizens’ “voting strength.” Allen, 599 U. S., at 25 (quoting Gingles, 478 U. S., at 47). It is as if Congress had never amended Section 2. I first show how that is the consequence of today’s “updating”; I then address how the majority attempts to justify what it has done. The upshot is that the majority, without any good reason, has overturned Congress’s studied determination—along with this Court’s precedents upholding it—about how to rectify racial inequalities in electoral politics.
A
Let’s first drop the majority’s misleading label. What the majority gives us today is not an “updated Gingles framework.” Ante, at 32. It is its own thing, deserving of its own name. Maybe the Callais contrivance? Or if that seems too immediately pejorative, just say that what the majority does today is to impose the Callais requirements. At their base, all those requirements have the same function: They force a vote-dilution plaintiff to prove that a State adopted an election rule with racially discriminatory intent. On the majority’s view, a rule diluting minority votes—even making them count for nothing—poses no problem if motivated by “nonracial factors.” Ante, at 24. So a State has free rein to “use traditional districting factors” even when they minimize or cancel out minority votes. Ibid. And yet more practically important, a State may (so says the majority) draw districts for any political purpose, including for a purely “partisan purpose[]”—that is, to increase one party’s electoral strength—no matter their racial effects. Ante, at 25. For that reason, the majority insists, a Section 2 plaintiff has “a special burden to overcome.” Ibid. (quoting Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 602 U. S. 1, 9 (2024) and Cooper, 581 U. S., at 308). The plaintiff “must disentangle race from politics by proving that the former drove a district’s lines.” Ante, at 25 (quoting Alexander, 602 U. S., at 9, and Cooper, 581 U. S., at 308; emphasis deleted). In other words, he must show that the State, in drawing that district, had not a political but instead a racial motivation—that it acted for the specific purpose of weakening a minority group’s voting influence. The new Callais requirements, as I’ll soon discuss, are all (concededly) designed to ensure that the plaintiff is held to that “special burden”—which, as the Congress amending Section 2 well understood, is nearly insuperable.5 But before becoming so granular, it is worth asking what precedents support the majority’s insistence on evidence of racially discriminatory intent. By now, I hope, no reader will think those precedents concern Section 2. Our Section 2 precedents are quite to the contrary: It is “patently clear,” Allen recently summarized, that because Section 2 liability “turns on the presence of discriminatory effects, not discriminatory intent,” a plaintiff need not demonstrate a “purpose of racial discrimination.” 599 U. S., at 25 (quoting Gingles, 478 U. S., at 71, n. 34). So the majority must go further afield. Its citations regarding the plaintiff ’s “special burden” of showing that race rather than politics (or anything else) motivated the State are from this Court’s racial-gerrymandering jurisprudence. See ante, at 25 (citing Alexander and Cooper). But racial gerrymandering claims and vote-dilution claims are, despite some superficial similarities, different legal beasts. Contra, ante, at 36 (confusing and conflating the two). Plaintiffs bringing the former need not have suffered vote dilution, nor do they invoke Section 2. Their claim is simply that purposeful racial sort- ing—all on its own, irrespective of any vote-minimizing effects—violates the Fourteenth Amendment.6 In such a case (as I have elsewhere explained), it is of course essential to have proof of race-based purpose. See Cooper, 581 U. S., at 291–292, 308. But not so when the claim is for vote dilution, brought under a statute that (in Allen’s words again) “clearly rejected treating discriminatory intent as a requirement for liability.” 599 U. S., at 37. In that context, putting a burden on the plaintiff to show that district lines were “driven by” racial rather than political (or other) factors, ante, at 29, is to reject everything this Court has ever said about Congress’s Section 2 choice.
The majority’s misplaced focus on purpose shows up first, and most critically, in its recasting of the first Gingles precondition. That threshold requirement, as the majority acknowledges, has always functioned to ensure that a minority community is large and geographically compact enough to elect a representative of its choice in a reasonably configured district. See ante, at 8, 29; supra, at 18–19. So the illustrative maps most vote-dilution plaintiffs submit show exactly that—how a reasonable majority-minority district could be created. But now, the majority says, the first precondition must be devoted to flushing out discriminatory purpose on the part of the State, by excluding the possibility that its districting plan arose from nonracial motives. See ante, at 29–30. So the plaintiffs’ alternative maps have to satisfy (as well or better than the State’s own) every permissible districting criterion the State specifies, including—and this is the kicker—all its “political goals.” Ibid. Those goals include the “partisan distribution” of districts within the State—say, that six seats should be held by one party and none by the other. Ibid. Likewise, they apparently encompass the partisan balance within any district— say, to ensure “a specific margin of victory” for a candidate. Ibid. Only if the plaintiffs’ maps “achieve [all those] goals just as well” as the State’s plan, the majority intones, can those maps “help to ‘disentangle race’ from politics”—or, otherwise said, show that the State’s plan was “driven by racial” motives. Ibid. (quoting again Alexander, 602 U. S., at 6—a racial gerrymandering, not Section 2 dilution, case). That change alone is likely to bring vote-dilution suits (already hard to win) to a screeching halt. To see how, return to the circle hypothetical—until now, the paradigmatic case of vote dilution, because the State there prevents Black (but not White) voters from having an opportunity to elect their preferred representative, as Section 2 demands. See supra, at 1–2. The legislature, recall, has sliced the majority-Black circle district into six pie pieces, with each added to (and only marginally affecting) a predominantly-White district. Before today, the first Gingles precondition is met with ease, just with a picture of the old district: Yes, that picture would say, Black voters can form—in fact, have formed—a majority in a district drawn consistent with traditional principles. See supra, at 21. But after today? Suppose the State, per the majority’s instructions, asserts that it cracked the African American electorate because it wants six safe Republican districts. Now the plaintiffs’ illustrative map, insists the majority, must also have six safe Republican districts. But given that race and partisan preference are linked (with Black citizens mainly voting Democratic), such a map cannot be drawn. Any map with a majority-Black district will not be a map with all Republican seats. And so, the majority decides, a Section 2 suit must fail at the outset—even though the State has deprived Black citizens of any opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. At least where such common race-based voting patterns hold, States now have an automatic political-gerrymandering defense to vote-dilution claims.
Yet more, the majority’s reworking of Gingles’s first precondition (contra its assurance) will doom vote-dilution suits even when majority and minority voters support different candidates within a single party. Take an example offered by the Solicitor General, whose ideas about how to upend Gingles the majority largely filches. See Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 20–31. In that hypothetical, Black, Hispanic, and White voters residing in Harlem all vote mainly for Democrats, but have “different candidates of choice.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 119. The Solicitor General maintains that if the district lines “favor[] one of those racial groups”—let’s say, the Black voters—“that’s the sort of situation where Section 2 could come in.” Ibid. The majority agrees, because there the State’s preference for one party could not explain the district lines drawn. See ante, at 27, 29–30. But under the majority’s test, the legislature could easily invoke other political, as well as non-political, goals to justify the lines and thus preclude liability. Suppose the State asserted that it drew the lines to protect an incumbent, who just so happened to be favored by Black residents. Or suppose the State said it wanted to increase (or decrease or maintain) the district’s partisan competitiveness (created by its ratio of Democrats to Republicans), which just coincidentally gave Black voters more influence. Or suppose the State said that it wished to keep the existing district’s core intact (itself a frequent districting criterion, see ante, at 24), rather than make the changes needed to give non-Black voters greater electoral opportunity. The possibilities are endless. And each would have the same result. Because a Section 2 plaintiff ’s map could not as well advance the bespoke political (or other) goal(s) favoring the Black voters’ chosen candidate, the suit would fail—even if non-Black votes, election year in and election year out, had been made to count for nothing.
Congress, as should by now be clear, made a different choice. In amending Section 2, Congress opted for the effects test of White over the purpose test of Bolden. See su pra, at 13–16. And it did so largely because of the unfeasibility of countering a State’s non-race-based justification for a given districting decision. See supra, at 15–16. Such a demand, the authors of the Senate compromise explained, would impose “an inordinately difficult burden,” precluding a remedy for even the most “egregious” cases of vote dilution. Senate Report, at 36–37. Yet that is exactly the burden the majority makes Section 2 plaintiffs bear—and at the first threshold condition. The majority makes no effort to explain how minority voters can meet its new requirement. How they can devise a map satisfying (at least as well as the State’s own) each of the State’s asserted political and other goals while also creating (or maintaining) a majority-minority district.7 Or assuming they cannot draw such a map, whether they may produce other evidence of racially discriminatory motive to meet (or else bypass) the first Callais requirement. Or if they may offer such evidence, how (if at all) it might differ from the kind generally needed to prevail in a racial gerrymandering suit—i.e., “direct evidence,” like “leaked e-mails” from legislators professing the desire to reduce a racial group’s voting strength. Alexander, 602 U. S., at 8. Presumably, the majority thinks that the details do not much matter. Once Section 2 has been transformed, via a change to Gingles’s first precondition, from a ban on racially dilutive effects (à la White) to a ban on race-based motives (à la Bolden), virtually all vote-dilution cases will fail anyway. The majority has thus nullified Congress’s decision to provide a remedy, without proof of intent, for state action that “results in” a minority group’s lesser opportunity “to elect representatives.” §10301.
But the majority is not yet done thwarting Congress’s objective. Maybe in some exceptional case, a State will fail to assert a goal, like political gerrymandering, that the plaintiff ’s map cannot replicate. Then, the majority’s makeover of the second and third Gingles preconditions comes into play, again to convert Section 2 into its opposite—a statute turning on discriminatory intent, not effects. Contra, Allen, 599 U. S., at 25 (“§2 turns on the presence of discriminatory effects, not discriminatory intent”). Until today, the second and third preconditions focused simply on racially polarized voting: Plaintiffs had to show that minority citizens vote cohesively, but cannot elect their preferred candidates because majority citizens vote as a bloc for others. See supra, at 18–19. Now the majority introduces a new requirement to impede Section 2 suits: “[T]he plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation.” Ante, at 30. That means if minority citizens vote mainly for one party and majority citizens vote mainly for another, none of that difference can count toward meeting the second and third preconditions. So in offering evidence of polarized voting preferences, a plaintiff must remove from the equation . . . polarized voting preferences. For in most places (even if not in Harlem), partisan difference is the way those divergent preferences are expressed—and the way one racial group’s vote can swamp another’s, again and again. The majority argues that its new requirement is needed to rule out the possibility that the State districted as it did for partisan, rather than racial, reasons. See ibid. But the State’s intent is not what is supposed to matter in a Section 2 suit. Congress amended Section 2 (need I say again?) to ensure that it would function as an effects test. The majority wishes a different statute, and makes it so.8 And so too for Section 2’s “totality of circumstances” inquiry. §10301(b). Should some litigant miraculously arrive at that stage of a vote-dilution suit, he will find it transformed. The “totality” test, today’s majority insists, must focus on only one thing: “intentional present-day voting discrimination.” Ante, at 31. But that is neither what Congress said nor what Congress meant when it added the phrase “totality of circumstances”—obviously referring to multiple things—to Section 2. See Allen, 599 U. S., at 26 (A “single-minded” concentration on “only one circumstance[]” “cannot be squared with [Section 2’s] demand”). Derived from White, that phrase demands the kind of “intensely local appraisal” the Court there used to evaluate a districting plan’s “impact” on a minority group’s access to the political process. 412 U. S., at 769–770. That appraisal of course included evidence relating to “intentional present-day voting discrimination.” Ante, at 31. But it included as well the continuing effects of past discrimination—and not only in politics but in other spheres of life. See White, 412 U. S., at 767–769; supra, at 11–12. The majority’s flattening of the prescribed inquiry mirrors Bolden’s conversion of White into a test for illicit motive. See supra, at 12–13. But it was precisely to reverse that shift that Congress enacted Section 2’s current “totality” language.
The consequences of the new Callais requirements show up immediately, in the majority’s disposition of this case. The District Court may have heard five days of testimony; may have properly applied the (old) Gingles factors; may have explained in 110 fact-intensive pages why the vote-dilution plaintiffs were likely to prevail. See supra, at 22–23. But the majority thinks it “eas[y]” to overturn all that court’s work in a few paragraphs. Ante, at 32. The plaintiffs flunked the (new) first Gingles precondition because their illustrative map, although showing a reasonably configured majority-minority district, “fail[ed] to meet the State’s political goal[]” of protecting every incumbent Republican Representative. Ante, at 33. The plaintiffs came up short on the (new) second and third preconditions because their showing of racially polarized voting—“that black and white voters consistently supported different candidates”—“did not control for partisan preferences.” Ante, at 34. And anyway, the plaintiffs could not prevail under the (new) “totality of circumstances” test because they did not show “that the State’s challenged map was the result of intentional racial discrimination”; all the plaintiffs’ evidence—like the dearth of Black-preferred candidates ever elected in the State—could just be the result of “politics.” Ante, at 34–35. Bang, bang, bang. It is like shooting fish in a barrel. Once the State can rely on any political goal of its devising—and once “inter-party racial polarization” serves to “undercut” rather than “strengthen[]” a vote-dilution claim—no plausibly existing evidence in this case could have made a difference. Ante, at 30, 34 (emphasis deleted). And nothing is special about this majority-minority district; as the Callais requirements have eliminated it today, so they will eliminate other and older ones in the years to come. Recall that this majority-Black district (which is District 6) was Louisiana’s second. See supra, at 22–23. The State’s District 2 has had a Black majority since 1983, when a vote-dilution suit forced its creation. If Louisiana were tomorrow to slice up District 2, dispersing its Black residents among the rest, it is hard to see how the now judicially amended Section 2 could stand in the way. The State presumably would assert as its “political goal” an all-Republican congressional delegation; in other words, it would announce a partisan gerrymander. Ante, at 25, 33. And because of the severe racial polarization in the State, that goal would be incompatible with maintaining District 2 as is. So those advocating for its majority-minority composition would almost surely lose at the first Callais requirement (and, as above, at the others as well). Repeated often enough across the country, the same districting practice— really, hinging only on the partisan ambitions (or restraint) of state legislatures—could destroy most of the majority- minority districts that in the past 40 years the Voting Rights Act created. The Callais requirements have thus laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction. Under cover of “updat[ing]” and “realign[ing]” this greatest of statutes, ante, at 29, the majority makes a nullity of Section 2 and threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.
B
There is only one “special burden” appropriate to deciding this case. Ante, at 25. And it is not the utterly novel one that the majority imposes on Section 2 vote-dilution plaintiffs to “disentangle” state motives. Ibid. Rather, it is the well-settled one that the Court itself must meet before overturning precedent about the meaning of a statute. Our law is clear. Stare decisis—the presumption that “today’s Court should stand by yesterday’s decisions”—“carries enhanced force” when the decision in question “interprets a statute.” Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 576 U. S. 446, 455– 456 (2015). That is because our statutory, unlike our constitutional, rulings can always be changed by Congress itself. See id., at 456. (Just recall how Congress rejected our decision in Bolden.) When this Court has said what a statute means—and Congress has said nothing to the contrary—a “superpowered form of stare decisis” takes hold, which only a “superspecial justification” can overcome. Id., at 458. Or, as one Justice has put it, there is in that circumstance a “nearly impregnable . . . shield” protecting the decision. Minerva Surgical, Inc. v. Hologic, Inc., 594 U. S. 559, 579 (2021) (ALITO, J., dissenting).
This Court, as noted above, invoked that shield to uphold Gingles just three Terms ago. See supra, at 20–21. In Al len, Alabama proposed a way of limiting Gingles to make it harder to win a vote-dilution suit. We responded that “Congress is undoubtedly aware” of how this Court has construed Section 2. 599 U. S., at 39. And, we said, “[i]t can change that if it likes.” Ibid. “But until and unless it does, statutory stare decisis counsels our staying the course.” Ibid. (citing Kimble, 576 U. S., at 456); see also 599 U. S., at 42, 43, n. 1 (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring in part) (invoking “stringent statutory stare decisis” rules and noting that “[i]n the past 37 years” Congress “ha[s] not disturbed Gin gles”). And if that’s not enough (though why not?), then there’s this. JUSTICE ALITO dissented in Allen in a way that prefigured today’s opinion, proposing there that the Gingles framework be changed to reflect his own views about Section 2’s text and constitutional context. See 599 U. S., at 103–104, 108–109; compare ante, at 20–26. The Court noted his argument that “[t]he Gingles framework should be [re]interpreted”—and then said no. 599 U. S., at 39, n. 10 (alterations in original). “[A]s we have explained,” the Court stated, “Gingles effectuates the delicate legislative bargain that §2 embodies.” Ibid.; see id., at 17–19; supra, at 13–15. “And statutory stare decisis,” the Court concluded, “counsels strongly in favor of not undoing” that “compromise.” 599 U. S., at 39, n. 10 (alteration omitted). Apparently, though, statutory stare decisis is now done “counsel[ing],” id., at 39, and n. 10; it is not so much as mentioned in today’s opinion.
That void is more remarkable still given Allen’s own reaffirmation of Gingles on the merits (even putting aside its precedential status). Just control-find for all my citations of Allen (or better yet read the decision), and you will have a good idea of its character. In addition to awarding Gingles the highest form of stare decisis protection, Allen (1) traced the history of Section 2’s amendment as I have, focusing on Congress’s rejection of Bolden’s motive inquiry in favor of White’s effects test, see 599 U. S., at 10–14; (2) explained as I have how each part of the Gingles framework functions and how the Court has used that framework “[f]or the past forty years” “in one §2 case after another,” 599 U. S., at 17– 19; (3) showed how the District Court’s analysis (which closely resembles the one here) conformed in all respects to Gingles, see 599 U. S., at 19–23;9 and (4) rejected the notions that the Gingles framework should not apply to single- member districting or that it violates the Fifteenth Amendment, see 599 U. S., at 38–42; infra, at 41. The majority’s main claim for why Allen nonetheless has no relevance here is that the decision “was about” Alabama’s “specific argument” that a vote-dilution suit could succeed only if the State’s map deviated from a “race-neutral benchmark.” Ante, at 31. Well, sure, Allen was about that too. And in rebuffing that argument, it used reasoning that equally discredits the new Callais requirements.10 But even put that aside. The key point here is that at every step of its multi- step analysis, and in every part of its multi-part opinion, Allen reaffirmed Gingles—the old Gingles, with its old understanding of what Congress did when amending Section 2. So Allen, too, demands that today’s majority, before mutilating Gingles, possess a “superspecial justification.” Kimble, 576 U. S., at 458.
And it does not have one. Not a superspecial justification; not a special justification; not even an ordinary decent justification. On the statute’s text, on the statute’s constitutional context, and on “historical developments” post-dating the statute—the majority fails at every turn. Ante, at 26. The majority’s textual analysis is long and winding and, in its crucial move, wholly non-textual. The majority tells us it will interpret the phrase “less opportunity than other members of the electorate . . . to elect representatives of their choice.” §10301(b); see ante, at 20. It then says a number of things, to no apparent effect, about the component terms “opportunity,” “other members of the electorate,” and “elect.” Ante, at 20–21. And then, the majority puts all that aside and begins to free solo. See ante, at 21– 22. What the provision promises minority voters, the majority says in the critical passage, is—and is only—“whatever opportunity results from the application of the State’s combination of permissible criteria.” Ante, at 22. Can you find that in the “less opportunity” phrase? What the majority means is that if the State has used non-race-based criteria (whether political or non-political) to draw its districts, then Section 2 has nothing to say. Even though those criteria produce a world (think about my cracked circle district) in which minority voters, compared to their White neighbors, have “less opportunity” to “elect representatives of their choice,” a vote-dilution claim cannot prevail. §10301(b). That can only happen, according to the majority’s view, when the district lines arise from “[im]permissible,” race-based criteria—that is, when the State’s evident intent was to strip minority voters of their opportunity to elect. Ante, at 22. With that interpretation in mind, read Congress’s “less opportunity” phrase again. It is miles away.
And of course it is. Because, once more, the “less opportunity” standard was designed to focus on the “results” of a state practice, not on its justifications. §10301(a). Congress had seen again and again—when it amended Section 2 in 1982, had seen for over a century—how race-neutral election procedures, including in districting, could produce discriminatory results. See supra, at 7–8, 13, 15. Congress knew States did not have to rely on impermissible, race- based criteria to “minimize[] or cancel[] out [minority] voting strength.” Allen, 599 U. S., at 25. So when this Court decided Bolden—which immunized race-neutral election procedures unless a plaintiff could produce smoking-gun evidence of discriminatory intent—Congress responded. It did not, as I’ve described, opt for proportional representation; it enacted a standard that would take some work to meet. See §10301; supra, at 19–20. But it most assuredly did not amend Section 2 to give minority citizens only “whatever” the “application of the State’s combination of permissible” (i.e., “nonracial”) “criteria” produced. Ante, at 22, 24.
So the majority must turn elsewhere, and it next lands on the Constitution. There, it begins in settled territory. The Fifteenth Amendment, all agree, prohibits only purposeful discrimination. See ante, at 23. But that amendment, in addition, grants Congress the power to enforce it by “appropriate legislation.” Even the majority concedes that grant enables Congress to go further than the Amendment would—to prohibit things by legislation that the Amendment itself does not. See ante, at 22–23. The important issue is how far and how much. And here the majority makes an unprecedented claim. It contends that to “ensure” compliance with the Fifteenth Amendment, Section 2 must be construed to impose liability only when the circumstances create a “strong inference” of intentional discrimination. Ante, at 23. And more, the majority makes clear that the circumstances will not do so when the State can point to any remotely plausible race-neutral justification—whether political or non-political—for the district lines it has drawn. See ante, at 24 (“Properly understood,” Section 2 “does not intrude on States’ prerogative to draw districts based on nonracial factors”). That is so regardless of how discriminatory its districting is in operation—even to the point of “eliminating” in one fell swoop “all majority- minority districts.” Ante, at 23.11 I just called that claim “unprecedented,” and so it is: The majority has conjured it out of thin air. From before Section 2 was amended until today, Congress was understood to have constitutional power to ban practices resulting in unequal voting opportunities, irrespective of proof of racial motive. And likewise, Congress was understood to have power to prohibit vote-diluting practices even when a State could proffer some sort of plausible race-neutral justification. In this Court’s seminal decisions, we explained that the phrase “appropriate legislation” in the Fifteenth Amendment grants Congress “the same broad powers expressed in the Necessary and Proper Clause.” Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U. S. 641, 650 (1966); see Katzenbach, 383 U. S., at 325–327. So Congress has “discretion” to determine “whether and what legislation is needed to secure” the Amendment’s “guarantees.” Morgan, 384 U. S., at 651. And that discretion, as critical here, extends to “outlaw[ing] voting practices that are discriminatory in effect,” without proof of intent. City of Rome, 446 U. S., at 173. In explaining why, this Court first underscored the connection between past discriminatory intent and present discriminatory results: Congress, we held, could decide that some unintentional state action works to “freeze the effect of past [purposeful] discrimination.” Id., at 176. And that was not all. Congress also could enact an effects test, we held, as the appropriate way of preventing current intentional discrimination—a sort of prophylactic rule responding to the “risk” (often made reality in American history) of a State’s using ostensibly race-neutral practices to cover impermissible goals. See id., at 177; see also Katzenbach, 383 U. S., at 309, 335.
And if those decisions are too ancient for today’s majority, it should consider (again) Allen, from three Terms ago. There, Alabama made an argument, similar to the majority’s, that the effects-based framework of Section 2 and Gin gles too far strayed from the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on intentional discrimination. We stomped on that objection. “[T]he prior decisions of this Court,” we stated, “foreclose any argument that Congress may not, pursuant to §2 [of the Fifteenth Amendment], outlaw voting practices that are discriminatory in effect.” 599 U. S., at 41; see id., at 45 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (“[T]he constitutional argument presented by Alabama is not persuasive in light of the Court’s precedents”). Section 2’s “ban on electoral changes that are discriminatory in effect,” we continued, “is an appropriate method of promoting the purposes of the Fifteenth Amendment.” Id., at 41. And if that were not enough, one final way of driving home the point: “[W]e are not persuaded” by the view that the “effects test” of Section 2 “as interpreted in Gingles exceeds the remedial authority of Congress.” Ibid. Those well-established precepts permit Congress to do what Congress did when it amended Section 2—prohibit electoral schemes based on their vote-diluting effects, regardless whether a State could offer up some race-neutral explanation. Congress then knew that it possessed such enforcement power; our decisions settling the issue were landmarks of the civil rights era. And Congress decided to use its authority. It did not make asserted state interests irrelevant: Those interests, indeed, had to be considered in the “totality of circumstances” inquiry Congress prescribed. §10301(b); see supra, at 20. But neither did Congress make those interests a nearly impregnable shield, as the majority does today. It understood, just as the Court had, that even race-neutral actions could perpetuate purposeful racial discrimination. And it realized, again in the same vein as the Court, that race-neutral explanations could conceal race-based intent. See supra, at 15–16. Today’s majority makes plain its disdain for those views. See ante, at 22–26. But the Fifteenth Amendment gave the power to enforce its guarantees not to this Court but to Congress.
So the majority moves on again, now to a grab-bag of “developments” that it somehow thinks license it to rewrite a statute. Ante, at 26–29. The majority first summons the slogan of Shelby County, in which the Court ordained itself the arbiter of when civil rights laws are no longer needed. “‘[T]hings have changed dramatically,’” today’s majority echoes, pointing to increases in African American voting registration and to the success of “‘African-Americans attain[ing] political office’”—“particularly in the South, where many §2 suits arise.” Ante, at 26 (quoting Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 547, 553). No doubt that is so, in large measure because of the Voting Rights Act. But it is a separate question whether those gains will endure once the Act’s protections are gone. See Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 590 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (noting the fallacy of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”). And surely—but apparently not—the proper actor to answer that question is Congress. For one thing, it likely has a fuller understanding of the issue. I will be interested to see, for example, whether time will vindicate the majority’s view that the “great strides” made in African American office-holding, “particularly in the South,” will hold up after the issuance of this opinion. Ante, at 26. My own guess is not. See supra, at 33–34. But honestly, the American people pay no Member of this Court to make those predictive policy judgments—and more important, the Constitution does not allow us to base our decisions on them. It is for the people’s representatives in Congress to decide when the Nation need no longer worry about the dilution of minority voting strength. So long as Congress has not done so—and it has not—this Court has no right to cancel (sorry, “update”) a duly enacted statute on the theory that it knows better.
Indeed, the majority’s “things have changed” stance here is yet less defensible than in Shelby County. That is because Section 2, unlike the now-defunct Section 5, itself responds to change, so no external “fix” is needed. Section 5 selected jurisdictions for preclearance based on past conditions; so if the provision’s last authorization was many years in the past, the mechanism could appear outdated. See Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 551 (“Coverage today is based on decades-old data and eradicated practices”). Section 2, by contrast, does not run on historical data. Liability attaches based only on present electoral practices and the present discrimination they “result[] in.” §10301(a). A plaintiff must prove that the political process is “not equally open to participation” by all citizens at the time of suit; if he cannot, he loses. Ibid. There is thus no danger, as Shelby County put it, that “current burdens” are not “justified by current needs.” 570 U. S., at 536. Under Section 2, they must be.
The Gingles preconditions yet further anchor Section 2 suits in the here-and-now by working as built-in sunset clauses. The first precondition is met only if a racial group is (in the present) geographically concentrated. See supra, at 18–19. That means as residential segregation decreases in a State, Section 2 becomes unavailable as a remedy. See Allen, 599 U. S., at 28–29. Similarly, the second and third preconditions can be satisfied only if voting (again, in the present) is racially polarized. See supra, at 18–19. So as racial bloc voting recedes, Section 2 ceases to operate. And racial desegregation and depolarization are not just possible in theory; they are happening in fact—and at speed—in many parts of the country. See Brief for Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos as Amicus Curiae 16–29. Consistent with those trends, the number of successful Section 2 vote-dilution suits (always fairly small) has declined every decade since the statute was amended. Katz Brief 6. In short, as “things change dramatically,” Section 2 self-liquidates—and to a fair extent, it already has. But in the places where, because of local conditions, the law continues to work, the Court has no warrant to speed its demise.
Nor is the majority aided by what it terms the emergence of a “full-blown two-party system” in “the States where §2 suits are most common.” Ante, at 27. As to that development, the majority reiterates its persistent theme: When racially polarized voting expresses itself in different party preferences, district lines may reflect partisan rather than racial motives, and so Section 2 should drop out of the picture. See ante, at 27, 30, 32. But as an initial matter, the majority’s newly formulated test will eliminate the lion’s share of Section 2 claims even when racially polarized voting occurs within a single party—as in the Solicitor General’s Harlem example, discussed above. See supra, at 28– 29. The State could not then assert a partisan-gerrymandering defense, but it could invoke a host of other race-neutral justifications, like incumbency protection or district continuity, to ward off liability. In short, the majority’s test fails to save Section 2 even for the “intra-party [racial] disparities” that the majority asserts Congress had in mind. Ante, at 27.
And more fundamentally, the majority is wrong on its history. By 1982 (the year of Section 2’s amendment), Congress well knew that “race is often correlated with party preference,” because that was increasingly the case. Ibid. Senate hearings were replete with testimony about that growing correlation, with opponents of the House’s “results in” language (Senator Hatch and his camp) questioning witnesses about why “minority groups alone” should be “immune to partisan or ideological gerrymandering.” Senate Report, at 184; see id., at 172, n. 235; Hearings on S. 53 et al. before the Subcomm. on the Constitution of the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 2d Sess., 649, 964– 965, 1255, 1376–1377 (1982). But those proponents of Bol den, of course, did not get their way: The Dole proposal maintained the House’s emphasis on results, not motives. See supra, at 14–15. So the majority’s appeal to an old “oneparty system,” ante, at 27, like the rest of its insistence on disentangling partisanship and race, works not to uphold but instead to overthrow the bargain Congress made. The last argument about “post-Gingles development[s]” worth mentioning is also the most dispiriting. Ibid. Seven years ago, this Court held in Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U. S. 684 (2019), that claims of political gerrymandering are not justiciable in federal court. That was, in my view, an ill-considered decision, whose adverse effects have never been more obvious than today, as this country’s two major parties compete in a race to the bottom. But to its (modest) credit, the Rucho Court did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding. To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were “incompatible with democratic principles” and “lead[] to results that reasonably seem unjust.” Id., at 718. (The Court’s rationale was only that federal courts lack competence to deal with gerrymanders, not that they were protected by law or beneficial as policy.) Today, though, the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders. See ante, at 27–28. For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process? See ibid. And with that, the majority as much as invites States to embark on a new round of partisan gerrymanders—and makes an already bad precedent into one still worse. It is not enough that Rucho has harmed the whole body politic. Now, that decision also becomes the cudgel to diminish the rightful voting influence of its minority citizens.
IV
Congress amended Section 2 to reverse this Court’s decision in Bolden that the law barred only intentional racial discrimination in voting. Based on a century of history, Congress determined that such a limited ban would not be enough to protect minority citizens’ voting rights. The legislation Congress enacted to correct Bolden emerged from vigorous debate and careful compromise, based mainly on this Court’s decision in White. The new law denied a right to proportional representation; it focused instead on the “opportunity” that a given election practice granted minority citizens. But the requisite opportunity was not to be assessed by a State’s intent or by its proffered justifications. Rather, the lawfulness of an election practice was to turn on its “results”—on whether it gave minority citizens a lesser chance than their majority neighbors to participate in politics and elect candidates. In making that choice, Congress exercised its constitutional responsibility to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. And when called on to interpret the new law, this Court—from Gingles all the way through Allen—respected and implemented what Congress had done.
Today’s majority does not. Its supposed “updating” of Gingles overthrows Congress’s decision to make Section 2 liability hinge on an electoral practice’s effects—on how it actually works. The new Callais requirements will effectively insulate any practice, including any districting scheme, said by a State to have any race-neutral justification. That justification can sound in traditional districting criteria, or else can sound in politics and partisanship. As to the latter, the State need do nothing more than announce a partisan gerrymander. Assuming the State has left behind no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect), Section 2 will play no role. “Whatever”—whatever—results from the State’s asserted justification is all its minority citizens are entitled to. Ante, at 22. Even if the State has deprived those citizens (but not their majority neighbors) of all opportunity to “elect representatives of their choice,” the law will not protect them. §10301(b). It is Bolden redux, despite Congress’s repudiation of that decision (and this Court’s precedents honoring that rejection). The majority has made its own assessment of current needs, see ante, at 26–28, and concluded that preventing racial vote dilution does not count among them. So once again, “in the absence of proof of intentional discrimination,” the right to vote gives minority citizens “nothing more than the right to cast meaningless ballots.” Bolden, 446 U. S., at 104 (Marshall, J., dissenting).
The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter—the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting—minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process. The decision here is about Louisiana’s District 6. But so too it is about Louisiana’s District 2. See supra, at 33–34. And so too it is about the many other districts, particularly in the South, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice. After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long. If other States follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. And minority representation in government institutions will sharply decline. At the first stage of this judicial project to destroy the Voting Rights Act, the Court maintained that Section 5 was no longer needed because in recent decades “African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.” Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 553; see id., at 549. At this last stage, the Court’s gutting of Section 2 puts that achievement in peril. I dissent because Congress elected otherwise. I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.