Page:Allen v. Milligan.pdf/80

Rh of our vote-dilution jurisprudence. It guarantees that courts will continue to approach vote-dilution claims just as the District Court here did: with no principled way of determining how many seats a minority “should” control and with a strong temptation to bless every incremental step toward a racially proportional allocation that plaintiffs can pass off as consistent with any reasonable map.

As noted earlier, the Court has long recognized the need to avoid interpretations of §2 that “ ‘would unnecessarily infuse race into virtually every redistricting, raising serious constitutional questions.’ ” Bartlett, 556 U. S., at 21 (plurality opinion) (quoting LULAC, 548 U. S., at 446 (opinion of Kennedy, J.)). Today, however, by approving the plaintiffs’ racially gerrymandered maps as reasonably configured, refusing to ground §2 vote-dilution claims in a race-neutral benchmark, and affirming a vote-dilution finding that can only be justified by a benchmark of proportional control, the majority holds, in substance, that race belongs in virtually every redistricting. It thus drives headlong into the very constitutional problems that the Court has long sought to avoid. The result of this collision is unmistakable: If the District Court’s application of §2 was correct as a statutory matter, §2 is unconstitutional as applied here.

Because the Constitution “restricts consideration of race and the [Voting Rights Act] demands consideration of race,” Abbott, 585 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 4), strict scrutiny is implicated wherever, as here, §2 is applied to require a State to adopt or reject any districting plan on the basis of race. See Bartlett, 556 U. S., at 21–22 (plurality opinion). At this point, it is necessary to confront directly one of the more confused notions inhabiting our redistricting jurisprudence. In several cases, we have “assumed” that compliance with §2 of the Voting Rights Act could be a compelling state interest, before proceeding to reject race-predominant