936
Thomas, J., concurring in judgment
ant pitfalls, only by abandoning proper methods of statutory construction. Our errors in method in past cases ordinarily might not indicate a need to forsake an established line of precedent. But here they have produced an "inherent tension" between our interpretation of § 2 and the text of the Act and have yielded a construction of the statute that, as I discuss below, is so unworkable in practice and destructive in its effects that it must be repudiated.
C
"Stare decisis is not an inexorable command," Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808, 828 (1991). Indeed, "when governing decisions are unworkable or are badly reasoned, this Court has never felt constrained to follow precedent." Id., at 827 (internal quotation marks omitted). The discussion above should make clear that our decision in Gingles interpreting the scope of § 2 was badly reasoned; it wholly substituted reliance on legislative history for analysis of statutory text. In doing so, it produced a far more expansive interpretation of § 2 than a careful reading of the language of the statute would allow.
Our interpretation of § 2 has also proved unworkable. As I outlined above, it has mired the federal courts in an inherently political task—one that requires answers to questions that are ill-suited to principled judicial resolution. Under § 2, we have assigned the federal judiciary a project that involves, not the application of legal standards to the facts of various cases or even the elaboration of legal principles on a case-by-case basis, but rather the creation of standards from an abstract evaluation of political philosophy.
Worse, our interpretation of § 2 has required us to distort our decisions to obscure the fact that the political choice at the heart of our cases rests on precisely the principle the Act condemns: proportional allocation of political power according to race. Continued adherence to a line of decisions that necessitates such dissembling cannot possibly promote what
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