358
Opinion of Souter, J.
denied or abridged . . . on account of race [or] color . . . ." Since the Act is an exercise of congressional power under § 2 of that Amendment, South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 325-327 (1966), the choice to follow the Amendment's terminology is most naturally read as carrying the meaning of the constitutional terms into the statute. United States v. Kozminski, 487 U. S. 931, 945 (1988) ("By employing the constitutional language, Congress apparently was focusing on the prohibition of comparable conditions"); cf. Morissette v. United States, 342 U. S. 246, 263 (1952) ("[W]here Congress borrows terms of art in which are accumulated the legal tradition and meaning of centuries of practice, it presumably knows and adopts the cluster of ideas that were attached to each borrowed word in the body of learning from which it was taken and the meaning its use will convey to the judicial mind unless otherwise instructed"). Any construction of the statute, therefore, carries an implication about the meaning of the Amendment, absent some good reason to treat the parallel texts differently on some particular point, and a reading of the statute that would not fit the Constitution is presumptively wrong.10
10 The majority argues that we should construe purpose and effect uniformly, as we would in laws regulating price discrimination, savings and loans, and cable franchises. See ante, at 331-332. I find the Fifteenth Amendment more relevant in interpreting § 5; the constitutional language provides a reason to give purpose its full breadth. The majority also claims that its reading leaves the purpose prong with some meaning because the Government need only refute a jurisdiction's claim that a change lacks retrogressive purpose in order to deny preclearance, without countering the jurisdiction's evidence regarding actual retrogressive effect. Ante, at 332. This assumes that purpose is easier to prove than effect. While that may be true in price-fixing cases, it is not true in voting rights cases (even though purpose is conceptually simpler than effect under § 5, see infra, at 367-368). Here, as in many other race discrimination cases, the parties agreed about the effects of the proposed changes while hotly disputing the reasons for them. The majority limits the purpose prong to the few cases in which attempted retrogression fails of its goal, a rather
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