Antonin Scalia

“ Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is not some all-purpose weapon for well-intentioned judges to wield as they please in the battle against discrimination. It is a statute. I thought we had adopted a regular method for interpreting the meaning of language in a statute: first, find the ordinary meaning of the language in its textual context; and second, using established canons of construction, ask whether there is any clear indication that some permissible meaning other than the ordinary one applies. ”

“ As the captions of the pleadings in some States still display, it is the prosecutor who represents "the People"; the judge represents the Law-which often requires him to rule against the People. It is precisely because we do not ordinarily conceive of judges as representatives that we held judges not within the Fourteenth Amendment's requirement of "one person, one vote." ”

“ It is quite absurd to think that Congress went out of its way to replace that term with "representatives," in order to convey what "candidates" naturally suggests (viz., coverage of all elections) and what "representatives" naturally does not.
A second consideration confirms that "representatives" in § 2 was meant in its ordinary sense. When given its ordinary meaning, it causes the statute to reproduce an established, eminently logical and perhaps practically indispensable limitation upon the availability of vote dilution claims. ”

“ There is little doubt that the ordinary meaning of "representatives" does not include judges, see Webster's Second New International Dictionary 2114 (1950) . The Court's feeble argument to the contrary is that "representatives" means those who "are chosen by popular election." Ante, at 399. On that hypothesis, the fan-elected members of the baseball All-Star teams are "representatives"-hardly a common, if even a permissible, usage. Surely the word "representative" connotes one who is not only elected by the people, but who also, at a minimum, acts on behalf of the people. ”

“ But "one person, one vote" has been the premise and the necessary condition of a vote dilution claim, since it establishes the baseline for computing the voting strength that the minority bloc ought to have. ”

“ Whatever other requirements may be applicable to elections for "representatives" (in the sense of those who are not only elected by but act on behalf of the electorate) , those elections, unlike elections for all office-holders, must be conducted in accordance with the equal-protection principle of "one person, one vote." And it so happens-more than coincidentally, I think-that in every case in which, prior to the amendment of § 2, we recognized the possibility of a vote dilution claim, the principle of "one person, one vote" was applicable. ”

“ Not only do we reach the wrong result with respect to the statute at hand, but we poison the well of future legislation, depriving legislators of the assurance that ordinary terms, used in an ordinary context, will be given a predictable meaning. ”

“ In reality, however, it is the Court rather than Congress that leads us-quite unnecessarily and indeed with stubborn persistence-into this morass of unguided and perhaps unguidable judicial interference in democratic elections. ”

“ The Court is stoic about the difficulty of defining "dilution" without a standard of purity, expressing its resolve to stand up to that onerous duty inescapably thrust upon it: "Even if serious problems lie ahead in applying the 'totality of the circumstances' described in § 2 (b) , that task, difficult as it may prove to be, cannot justify a judicially created limitation on the coverage of the broadly worded statute, as enacted and amended by Congress." Ante, at 403. One would think that Congress had said "candidates," rather than "representatives." ”

“ If, for example, a county permitted vote registration for only three hours one day a week, and that made it more difficult for blacks to register than whites, blacks would have less opportunity "to participate in the political process," than whites, and § 2 would therefore be violated-even if the number of potential black voters was so small that they would on no hypothesis be able to elect their own candidate, see Blumstein, Proving Race Discrimination, 69 Va.L.Rev. ”

“ The 1982 amendments, however, radically transformed the Act. As currently written, the statute proscribes intentional discrimination only if it has a discriminatory effect, but proscribes practices with discriminatory effect whether or not intentional. ”

“ While the "plain statement" rule may not be applicable, there is assuredly nothing whatever that points in the opposite direction, indicating that the ordinary meaning here should not be applied. Far from that, in my view the ordinary meaning of "representatives" gives clear purpose to congressional action that otherwise would seem pointless. As an initial matter, it is evident that Congress paid particular attention to the scope of elections covered by the "to elect" language. As the Court suggests, that language for the most part tracked this Court's opinions in White v. ”

“ It would distort the plain meaning of the sentence to substitute the word "or" for the word "and." Such radical surgery would be required to separate the opportunity to participate from the opportunity to elect." ”