Cite as: 608 U. S. ____ (2026) 23 Opinion of the Court “[t]here must be a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end.” Id., at 520. As the Court has long held, the Fifteenth Amendment bars only state action “ ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose.’ ” Reno v. Bossier Parish School Bd., 520 U. S. 471, 481 (1997) (quoting Mobile, 446 U. S., at 62). So a law that seeks to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by prohibiting mere disparate impact would fail to enforce a right that the Amendment secures. That is never “appropriate,” Katzenbach, 383 U. S., at 308, because Congress cannot “enforce a constitutional right by changing what the right is,” City of Boerne, 521 U. S., at 519. For this reason, the focus of §2 must be enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination. When §2 is properly interpreted in the way we have outlined, it is sufficiently congruent with and proportional to the Amendment’s prohibition. While that interpretation does not demand a finding of intentional discrimination, it imposes liability only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred. Suppose, for example, that the application of a State’s districting algorithm yields numerous maps with districts in which the members of a minority group constitute a majority, and suppose that the State cannot provide a legitimate reason for rejecting all those maps and eliminating all majority-minority districts. In such a situation, the inference of racial motivation is strong, and §2 of the Fifteenth Amendment permits the imposition of liability without demanding that the courts engage in the fraught enterprise of attempting to determine whether the state legislature as an institution, as opposed to certain individual members or the State’s hired mapmaker, was motivated by race. Only when understood this way does §2 of the Voting Rights Act properly fit within Congress’s Fifteenth