Such exercises of state power are no more immune to the limitations of the Fourteenth Amendment than any other state action. The Equal Protection Clause itself has been held to forbid some state laws that restrict the right to vote. The Attorney General of the State of New York argues that an exercise of congressional power under 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment that prohibits the enforcement of a state law can only be sustained if the judicial branch determines that the state law is prohibited by the provisions of the Amendment that Congress sought to enforce. Neither the language nor history of 5 supports such a construction. Congress is authorized to enforce the prohibitions by appropriate legislation.
Some legislation is contemplated to make the amendments fully effective.
A construction of 5 that would require a judicial determination that the enforcement of the state law precluded by Congress violated the Amendment, as a condition of sustaining the congressional enactment, would depreciate both congressional resourcefulness and congressional responsibility for implementing the Amendment. Thus our task in this case is not to determine whether the New York English literacy requirement as applied to deny the right to vote to a person who successfully completed the sixth grade in a Puerto Rican school violates the Equal Protection Clause. In answering this question, our task is limited to determining whether such legislation is, as required by 5, appropriate legislation to enforce the Equal Protection Clause. By including 5 the draftsmen sought to grant to Congress, by a specific provision applicable to the Fourteenth Amendment, the same broad powers expressed in the Necessary and Proper Clause, Art. That test was identified as the one formulated in McCulloch v. Maryland.