Thomas, J., dissenting
“the wrong question,” and that courts should instead ask whether a State’s election laws offered minorities “a fair opportunity to participate” in the political process. S. Rep. No. 97–417, p. 36.
As applied here, the amended §2 thus falls on the wrong side of “the line between measures that remedy or prevent unconstitutional actions and measures that make a substantive change in the governing law.” City of Boerne, 521 U. S., at 519. It replaces the constitutional right against intentionally discriminatory districting with an amorphous race-based right to a “fair” distribution of political power, a “right” that cannot be implemented without requiring the very evils the Constitution forbids.
If that alone were not fatal, §2’s “reach and scope” further belie any congruence and proportionality between its districting-related commands, on the one hand, and actionable constitutional wrongs, on the other. Id., at 532. Its “[s]weeping coverage ensures its intrusion at every level of government” and in every electoral system. Ibid. It “has no termination date or termination mechanism.” Ibid. Thus, the amended §2 is not spatially or temporally “limited to those cases in which constitutional violations [are] most likely.” Id., at 533. Nor does the statute limit its reach to “attac[k] a particular type” of electoral mechanism “with a long history as a ‘notorious means to deny and abridge voting rights on racial grounds.’ ” Ibid. (quoting South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 355 (1966) (Black, J., concurring and dissenting)). In view of this “indiscriminate scope,” “it simply cannot be said that ‘many of [the districting plans] affected by the congressional enactment have a significant likelihood of being unconstitutional.’ ” Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Ed. Expense Bd. v. College Savings Bank, 527 U. S. 627, 647 (1999) (quoting City of Boerne, 521 U. S., at 532).
Of course, under the logically unbounded totality-of-
