Page:Allen v. Milligan.pdf/82

Rh 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.” 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. ; 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