Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf
Page Number: 51.0

Cite as:  594 U. S. ____ (2021) 

7 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

C. Davidson eds. 1992).  The crudest attempts to block vot-
ing  access,  like  literacy  tests  and  poll  taxes,  disappeared.  
Legislatures often replaced those vote denial schemes with 
new measures—mostly to do with districting—designed to 
dilute the impact of minority votes.  But the Voting Rights 
Act, operating for decades at full strength, stopped many of 
those measures too.  See, e.g., Chisom v. Roemer, 501 U. S. 
380  (1991);  Allen  v.  State  Bd.  of  Elections,  393  U. S.  544 
(1969).  As a famed dissent assessed the situation about a 
half-century  after  the  statute’s  enactment:  The  Voting 
Rights Act had become “one of the most consequential, effi-
cacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative 
power in our Nation’s history.”  Shelby County, 570 U. S., 
at 562 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).1 

B 
  Yet  efforts  to  suppress  the  minority  vote  continue.    No 
one would know this from reading the majority opinion.  It 
hails  the  “good  news”  that  legislative  efforts  had  mostly 
shifted by the 1980s from vote denial to vote dilution.  Ante, 
at 7.  And then it moves on to other matters, as though the 
Voting Rights Act no longer has a problem to address—as 
though once literacy tests and poll taxes disappeared, so too 
did efforts to curb minority voting.  But as this Court recog-
nized  about  a  decade  ago,  “racial  discrimination  and  ra-
cially polarized voting are not ancient history.”  Bartlett v. 
Strickland, 556 U. S. 1, 25 (2009).  Indeed, the problem of 
voting discrimination has become worse since that time—
in  part  because  of  what  this  Court  did  in  Shelby  County.  

—————— 

1 The majority brands this historical account part of an “extended effort 
at misdirection.”  Ante, at 22.  I am tempted merely to reply: Enough said 
about the majority’s outlook on the statute before us.  But I will add what 
should  be  obvious—that  no one  can  understand  the  Voting  Rights  Act 
without recognizing what led Congress to enact it, and what Congress 
wanted it to change.