Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf
Page Number: 66.0

22 

BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

that Section 2 authorizes courts to conduct a “totality of cir-
cumstances” analysis.  Ante, at 16.  But as described above, 
Congress  mainly  added  that  language  so  that  Section  2 
could protect against “the demonstrated ingenuity of state 
and local governments in hobbling minority voting power.”  
De  Grandy,  512  U. S.,  at  1018;  see  supra,  at  16–17.    The 
totality  inquiry  requires  courts  to  explore  how  ordinary-
seeming laws can interact with local conditions—economic, 
social,  historical—to  produce  race-based  voting  inequali-
ties.  That inquiry hardly gives a court the license to devise 
whatever  limitations  on  Section  2’s  reach  it  would  have 
liked Congress to enact.  But that is the license the majority 
takes.  The “important circumstances” it invents all cut in 
one direction—toward limiting liability for race-based vot-
ing inequalities.  Ante, at 16.  (Indeed, the majority gratui-
tously dismisses several factors that point the opposite way.  
See ante, at 19–21.)  Think of the majority’s list as a set of 
extra-textual  restrictions  on  Section  2—methods  of  coun-
teracting the law Congress actually drafted to achieve the 
purposes  Congress  thought  “important.”    The  list—not  a 
test,  the  majority  hastens  to  assure  us,  with  delusions  of 
modesty—stacks the deck against minority citizens’ voting 
rights.  Never mind that Congress drafted a statute to pro-
tect  those  rights—to  prohibit  any  number  of  schemes  the 
majority’s non-test test makes it possible to save. 
  Start  with  the  majority’s  first  idea:  a  “[m]ere  inconven-
ience[ ]” exception to Section 2.  Ante, at 16.  Voting, the ma-
jority  says,  imposes  a  set  of  “usual  burdens”:  Some  time, 
some travel, some rule compliance.  Ibid.  And all of that is 
beneath the notice of Section 2—even if those burdens fall 
highly unequally on members of different races.  See ibid.  
But  that  categorical  exclusion,  for  seemingly  small  (or 
“[un]usual” or “[un]serious”) burdens, is nowhere in the pro-
vision’s text.  To the contrary (and as this Court has recog-
nized before), Section 2 allows no “safe harbor[s]” for elec-
tion  rules resulting  in disparate  voting  opportunities.   De