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Page Number: 33.0

2 

SHELBY COUNTY v. HOLDER 

GINSBURG, J., dissenting 

Ante,  at  2.  But  the  Court  today  terminates  the  remedy
that proved to be best suited to block that discrimination.
The  Voting  Rights  Act  of  1965  (VRA)  has  worked  to  com­
bat  voting  discrimination  where  other  remedies  had  been
tried  and  failed.  Particularly  effective  is  the  VRA’s  re­
quirement of federal preclearance for all changes to voting 
laws in the regions of the country with the most aggravated 
records  of  rank  discrimination  against  minority  voting
rights.

A  century  after  the  Fourteenth  and  Fifteenth  Amend­
ments  guaranteed  citizens  the  right  to  vote  free  of  dis­
crimination  on  the  basis  of  race,  the  “blight  of  racial 
discrimination 
in  voting”  continued  to  “infec[t]  the 
electoral process in parts of our country.”  South Carolina v. 
Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 308 (1966).  Early attempts to
cope with this vile infection resembled battling the Hydra.
Whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified
and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.  This Court 
repeatedly  encountered  the  remarkable  “variety  and 
persistence”  of  laws  disenfranchising  minority  citizens. 
Id., at 311.  To take just one example, the Court, in 1927, 
held  unconstitutional  a  Texas  law  barring  black  voters 
from participating in primary elections, Nixon v. Herndon, 
273  U. S.  536,  541;  in  1944,  the  Court  struck  down  a 
“reenacted”  and  slightly  altered  version  of  the  same  law, 
Smith  v.  Allwright,  321  U. S.  649,  658;  and  in  1953,  the 
Court  once  again  confronted  an  attempt  by  Texas  to  “cir­
cumven[t]”  the  Fifteenth  Amendment  by  adopting  yet 
another variant of the all-white primary, Terry v. Adams, 
345 U. S. 461, 469. 

During  this  era,  the  Court  recognized  that  discrimina­
tion against minority voters was  a quintessentially politi­
cal  problem  requiring  a  political  solution.    As  Justice 
Holmes explained: If “the great mass of the white popula­
tion  intends  to  keep  the  blacks  from  voting,”  “relief  from 
[that]  great  political  wrong,  if  done,  as  alleged,  by  the