360
Opinion of Souter, J.
U. S., at 494-495 (Breyer, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment).11
The Court has never held (save in Beer) that the concept of voting abridgment covers only retrogressive dilution, and any such reading of the Fifteenth Amendment would be outlandish. The Amendment contains no textual limitation on abridgment, and when it was adopted, the newly emancipated citizens would have obtained practically nothing from a mere guarantee that their electoral power would not be further reduced. Since § 5 of the Act is likewise free of any
11 We have suggested, but have never explicitly decided, that the Fifteenth Amendment applies to dilution claims. See Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55, 62-63 (1980) (plurality opinion); Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339, 346 (1960) (singling out racial minority for discriminatory treatment in voting violates Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits municipal boundaries drawn to exclude blacks). But see Mobile, supra, at 84, n. 3 (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment) (suggesting that Mobile plurality said that Fifteenth Amendment does not reach vote dilution); Voinovich v. Quilter, 507 U. S. 146, 159 (1993) (reserving the question); Shaw v. Reno, 509 U. S. 630, 645 (1993) (endorsing the practice of considering dilution claims under the Fourteenth Amendment); Beer v. United States, 425 U. S. 130, 142, n. 14 (1976).
The majority claims that Gomillion was not about dilution because it involved the exclusion of black voters from municipal elections. Ante, at 334-335, n. 3. The voters excluded from the gerrymandered Tuskegee were left in unincorporated areas, where they could, at most, vote for county and state officials. Changing political boundaries to affect minority voting power would be called dilution today. Gomillion shows that the physical image evoked by the term "dilution" does not encompass all the ways in which participation in the political process can be made unequal. That the Court did not use the word "dilution" in its modern sense in Gomillion does not diminish the force of its Fifteenth Amendment analysis.
The majority also suggests, ante, at 334-335, n. 3, that the Mobile plurality explicitly rejected reliance on the Fifteenth Amendment. But the same plurality recognized that " 'deny or abridge' " in § 2 of the Voting Rights Act mirrored the cognate language of the Fifteenth Amendment, Mobile, supra, at 60-61, and we have since held that the language of § 2 includes nonretrogressive dilution claims. See, e. g., Voinovich v. Quilter, supra, at 157.
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