Cite as: 515 U. S. 70 (1995)
Thomas, J., concurring
ing remedies once they had identified a constitutional violation. As Swann put it, "[o]nce a right and a violation have been shown, the scope of a district court's equitable powers to remedy past wrongs is broad, for breadth and flexibility are inherent in equitable remedies." 402 U. S., at 15. We did say that "the nature of the violation determines the scope of the remedy," id., at 16, but our very next sentence signaled how weak that limitation was: "In default by the school authorities of their obligation to proffer acceptable remedies, a district court has broad power to fashion a remedy that will assure a unitary school system," ibid.
It is perhaps understandable that we permitted the lower courts to exercise such sweeping powers. Although we had authorized the federal courts to work toward "a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis" in Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294, 300- 301 (1955) (Brown II), resistance to Brown I produced little desegregation by the time we decided Green v. School Bd. of New Kent Cty., supra. Our impatience with the pace of desegregation and with the lack of a good-faith effort on the part of school boards led us to approve such extraordinary remedial measures. But such powers should have been temporary and used only to overcome the widespread resistance to the dictates of the Constitution. The judicial overreaching we see before us today perhaps is the price we now pay for our approval of such extraordinary remedies in the past.
Our prior decision in this litigation suggested that we would approve the continued use of these expansive powers even when the need for their exercise had disappeared. In Missouri v. Jenkins, 495 U. S. 33 (1990) (Jenkins II), the District Court in this litigation had ordered an increase in local property taxes in order to fund its capital improvements plan. KCMSD, which had been ordered by the Court to finance 25% of the plan, could not pay its share due to state constitutional and statutory provisions placing a cap on property taxes. Id., at 38, 41. Although we held that principles
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