Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf
Page Number: 28.0

22 

BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 

Opinion of the Court 

right  to  vote  under  §2  does  not  require  outright  denial  of 
the right; that §2 does not demand proof of discriminatory 
purpose; and that a “facially neutral” law or practice may 
violate that provision.  See post, at 12–20. 
  Only after this extended effort at misdirection is the dis-
sent’s aim finally unveiled: to undo as much as possible the 
compromise that was reached between the House and Sen-
ate when §2 was amended in 1982.  Recall that the version 
originally  passed  by  the  House  did  not  contain  §2(b)  and 
was thought to prohibit any voting practice that had “dis-
criminatory  effects,”  loosely  defined.    See  supra,  at  5–6.  
That is the freewheeling disparate-impact regime the dis-
sent wants to impose on the States.  But the version enacted 
into  law  includes  §2(b),  and  that  subsection  directs  us  to 
consider “the totality of circumstances,” not, as the dissent 
would have it, the totality of just one circumstance.14  There 
is  nothing  to  the  dissent’s  charge  that  we  are  departing 
from the statutory text by identifying some of those consid-
erations. 
  We have listed five relevant circumstances and have ex-
plained why they all stem from the statutory text and have 
a bearing on the determination that §2 requires.  The dis-
sent does not mention a single additional consideration, and 
—————— 

14 The dissent erroneously claims that the Senate-House compromise 
was  only  about  proportional  representation  and  not  about  “the  equal- 
access right” at issue in the present cases.  Post, at 19, n. 6.  The text of 
the bill initially passed by the House had no equal-access right.  See H. R. 
Rep. No. 97–227, p. 48 (1981); H. R. 3112, 97th Cong., 1st Sess., §2, p. 8 
(introduced  Oct.  7,  1981).    Section  2(b)  was  the  Senate’s  creation,  and 
that provision is what directed courts to look beyond mere “results” to 
whether  a  State’s  “political  processes”  are  “equally  open,”  considering 
“the  totality  of  circumstances.”    See  Mississippi  Republican  Executive 
Committee v. Brooks, 469 U. S. 1002, 1010 (1984) (Rehnquist, J., dissent-
ing) (“The compromise bill retained the ‘results’ language but also incor-
porated  language  directly  from  this  Court’s  opinion  in  White  v. 
Regester”).    And  while  the  proviso  on  proportional  representation  may 
not apply as directly in this suit, it is still a signal that §2 imposes some-
thing other than a pure disparate-impact regime.