Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf
Page Number: 23.0

Cite as:  570 U. S. ____ (2013) 

19 

Opinion of the Court 

The  Government  suggests  that  Katzenbach  sanctioned 
such  an  approach,  but  the  analysis  in  Katzenbach  was 
quite  different.  Katzenbach  reasoned  that  the  coverage
formula  was  rational  because  the  “formula  . . .  was  rele-
vant  to  the  problem”:  “Tests  and  devices  are  relevant  to
voting  discrimination  because  of  their  long  history  as  a
tool for perpetrating the evil; a low voting rate is pertinent
for  the  obvious  reason  that  widespread  disenfranchise-
ment must inevitably affect the number of actual voters.”
383 U. S., at 329, 330. 

contrast, 

Here,  by 

the  Government’s 

reverse-
engineering  argument  does  not  even  attempt  to  demon-
strate the continued relevance of the formula to the problem 
it  targets.  And  in  the  context  of  a  decision  as  significant
as  this  one—subjecting  a  disfavored  subset  of  States
to  “extraordinary  legislation  otherwise  unfamiliar  to  our 
federal  system,”  Northwest  Austin,  supra,  at  211—that 
failure to establish even relevance is fatal. 

The  Government  falls  back  to  the  argument  that  be-
cause the formula was relevant in 1965, its continued use 
is permissible so long as any discrimination remains in the
States  Congress  identified  back  then—regardless  of  how 
that  discrimination  compares  to  discrimination  in  States
unburdened  by  coverage.  Brief  for  Federal  Respondent 
49–50.  This  argument  does  not  look  to  “current  political 
conditions,”  Northwest  Austin,  supra,  at  203,  but  instead 
relies  on  a comparison  between  the  States  in  1965.    That 
comparison  reflected  the  different  histories  of  the  North 
and South.  It was in the South that slavery was upheld by
law until uprooted by the Civil War, that the reign of Jim 
Crow  denied  African-Americans  the  most  basic  freedoms, 
and that state and local governments worked tirelessly to 
disenfranchise  citizens  on  the  basis  of  race.   The  Court 
invoked  that  history—rightly  so—in  sustaining  the  dis-
parate  coverage  of  the  Voting  Rights  Act  in  1966.    See 
Katzenbach, supra, at 308 (“The constitutional propriety of