Cite as: 521 U. S. 507 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
by seeking to regulate private conduct. The Enforcement Clause, the Court said, did not authorize Congress to pass "general legislation upon the rights of the citizen, but corrective legislation, that is, such as may be necessary and proper for counteracting such laws as the States may adopt or enforce, and which, by the amendment, they are prohibited from making or enforcing . . . ." Id., at 13-14. The power to "legislate generally upon" life, liberty, and property, as opposed to the "power to provide modes of redress" against offensive state action, was "repugnant" to the Constitution. Id., at 15. See also United States v. Reese, 92 U. S. 214, 218 (1876); United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629, 639 (1883); James v. Bowman, 190 U. S. 127, 139 (1903). Although the specific holdings of these early cases might have been superseded or modified, see, e. g., Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U. S. 241 (1964); United States v. Guest, 383 U. S. 745 (1966), their treatment of Congress' § 5 power as corrective or preventive, not definitional, has not been questioned.
Recent cases have continued to revolve around the question whether § 5 legislation can be considered remedial. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach, supra, we emphasized that "[t]he constitutional propriety of [legislation adopted under the Enforcement Clause] must be judged with reference to the historical experience . . . it reflects." 383 U. S., at 308. There we upheld various provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, finding them to be "remedies aimed at areas where voting discrimination has been most flagrant," id., at 315, and necessary to "banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting, which has infected the electoral process in parts of our country for nearly a century," id., at 308. We noted evidence in the record reflecting the subsisting and pervasive discriminatory—and therefore unconstitutional—use of literacy tests. Id., at 333-334. The Act's new remedies, which used the administrative resources of the Federal Government, included the suspension of both literacy tests and,
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