Thomas, J., dissenting
enforcement authority is “remedial, rather than substantive,” “[t]here must be a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end.”[1] Id., at 520. Congress’ chosen means, moreover, must “ ‘consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution.’ ” Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U. S. 529, 555 (2013) (quoting McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 421 (1819)); accord, Miller, 515 U. S., at 927.
Here, as with everything else in our vote-dilution jurisprudence, the task of sound analysis is encumbered by the lack of clear principles defining §2 liability in districting. It is awkward to examine the “congruence” and “proportionality” of a statutory rule whose very meaning exists in a perpetual state of uncertainty. The majority makes clear, however, that the primary factual predicate of a vote-dilution claim is “bloc voting along racial lines” that results in majority-preferred candidates defeating minority-preferred ones. Ante, at 17; accord, Gingles, 478 U. S., at 48 (“The theoretical basis for [vote-dilution claims] is that where minority and majority voters consistently prefer different candidates, the majority, by virtue of its numerical superiority, will regularly defeat the choices of minority voters”). And, as I have shown, the remedial logic with which the District Court’s construction of §2 addresses that “wrong” rests on a proportional-control benchmark limited only by feasibility. Thus, the relevant statutory rule may be approximately stated as follows: If voting is racially polarized in a jurisdiction, and if there exists any more or less reasonably configured districting plan that would enable the minority group to constitute a majority in a number of districts roughly proportional to its share of the population, then the jurisdiction
- ↑ While our congruence-and-proportionality cases have focused primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, they make clear that the same principles govern “Congress’ parallel power to enforce the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment.” City of Boerne, 521 U. S., at 518.
