Cite as: 594 U. S. ____ (2021) 3 KAGAN, J., dissenting reading to uphold two election laws from Arizona that discriminate against minority voters. I could say—and will in the following pages—that this is not how the Court is supposed to interpret and apply statutes. But that ordinary critique woefully undersells the problem. What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten—in order to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.” I respectfully dissent. I The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is an extraordinary law. Rarely has a statute required so much sacrifice to ensure its passage. Never has a statute done more to advance the Nation’s highest ideals. And few laws are more vital in the current moment. Yet in the last decade, this Court has treated no statute worse. To take the measure of today’s harm, a look to the Act’s past must come first. The idea is not to recount, as the majority hurriedly does, some bygone era of voting discrimination. See ante, at 2–3. It is instead to describe the electoral practices that the Act targets—and to show the high stakes of the present controversy. A Democratic ideals in America got off to a glorious start; democratic practice not so much. The Declaration of Independence made an awe-inspiring promise: to institute a government “deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed.” But for most of the Nation’s first century, that pledge ran to white men only. The earliest state election laws excluded from the franchise African Americans, Native Americans, women, and those without property. See A. Keyssar, The Right To Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States 8–21, 54–60 (2000). In