Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf
Page Number: 47

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

3 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

reading to uphold two election laws from Arizona that dis-
criminate against minority voters.  I could say—and will in 
the following pages—that this is not how the Court is sup-
posed  to  interpret  and  apply  statutes.    But  that  ordinary 
critique  woefully  undersells  the  problem.    What  is  tragic 
here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten—in order 
to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to Amer-
ica’s  greatness,  and  protects  against  its  basest  impulses.  
What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute de-
signed to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.”  
I respectfully dissent. 

I 
  The  Voting  Rights  Act  of  1965  is  an  extraordinary  law.  
Rarely  has  a  statute  required  so  much sacrifice  to  ensure 
its passage.  Never has a statute done more to advance the 
Nation’s highest ideals.  And few laws are more vital in the 
current  moment.    Yet  in  the  last  decade,  this  Court  has 
treated  no  statute  worse.    To  take the measure  of  today’s 
harm, a look to the Act’s past must come first.  The idea is 
not to recount, as the majority hurriedly does, some bygone 
era of voting discrimination.  See ante, at 2–3.  It is instead 
to describe the electoral practices that the Act targets—and 
to show the high stakes of the present controversy. 

A 
  Democratic ideals in America got off to a glorious start; 
democratic practice not so much.  The Declaration of Inde-
pendence  made  an  awe-inspiring  promise:  to  institute  a 
government “deriving [its] just powers from the consent of 
the governed.”  But for most of the Nation’s first century, 
that pledge ran to white men only.  The earliest state elec-
tion  laws excluded  from  the franchise  African  Americans, 
Native Americans, women, and those without property.  See 
A.  Keyssar,  The  Right  To  Vote:  The  Contested  History  of 
Democracy  in  the  United  States  8–21,  54–60  (2000).    In