2 SHELBY COUNTY v. HOLDER GINSBURG, J., dissenting Ante, at 2. But the Court today terminates the remedy that proved to be best suited to block that discrimination. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) has worked to com­ bat voting discrimination where other remedies had been tried and failed. Particularly effective is the VRA’s re­ quirement of federal preclearance for all changes to voting laws in the regions of the country with the most aggravated records of rank discrimination against minority voting rights. A century after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend­ ments guaranteed citizens the right to vote free of dis­ crimination on the basis of race, the “blight of racial discrimination in voting” continued to “infec[t] the electoral process in parts of our country.” South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 308 (1966). Early attempts to cope with this vile infection resembled battling the Hydra. Whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place. This Court repeatedly encountered the remarkable “variety and persistence” of laws disenfranchising minority citizens. Id., at 311. To take just one example, the Court, in 1927, held unconstitutional a Texas law barring black voters from participating in primary elections, Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U. S. 536, 541; in 1944, the Court struck down a “reenacted” and slightly altered version of the same law, Smith v. Allwright, 321 U. S. 649, 658; and in 1953, the Court once again confronted an attempt by Texas to “cir­ cumven[t]” the Fifteenth Amendment by adopting yet another variant of the all-white primary, Terry v. Adams, 345 U. S. 461, 469. During this era, the Court recognized that discrimina­ tion against minority voters was a quintessentially politi­ cal problem requiring a political solution. As Justice Holmes explained: If “the great mass of the white popula­ tion intends to keep the blacks from voting,” “relief from [that] great political wrong, if done, as alleged, by the