JONES et ux. v. ALFRED H. MAYER CO. et al.

No. 645.

Argued April 1-2, 1968.

Decided June 17, 1968.

*410Samuel H. Liberman argued the cause for petitioners. With him on the brief were Arthur Allen Leff and Samuel A. Chaitovitz.

*411Israel Treiman argued the cause and filed a brief for respondents.

Attorney General Clark argued the cause for the United States, as amicus curiae, urging reversal. With him on the brief were Solicitor General Griswold, Assistant Attorney General Poliak, Louis F. Claiborne, and Brian K. Landsberg.

Briefs of amid curiae, urging reversal, were filed by Thomas C. Lynch, Attorney General, Charles A. O’Brien, Chief Deputy Attorney General, and Loren Miller, Jr., and Philip M. Rosten, Deputy Attorneys General, for the State of California; by Frank J. Kelley, Attorney General, Robert A. Derengoski, Solicitor General, and Carl Levin, Assistant Attorney General, for the State of Michigan (Civil Rights Commission); by Norman H. Anderson, Attorney General, C. B. Bums, Jr., Special Assistant Attorney General, and Louis C. Defeo, Jr., and Deann Duff, Assistant Attorneys General, for the Missouri Commission on Human Rights; by Richard W. Mason, Jr., Ilus W. Davis, and Joseph H. McDowell for Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas; by Leo Pfeffer and Melvin L. Wulf for the American Civil Liberties Union et al.; by Sol Rabkin, Robert L. Carter, Joseph B. Robi-son, Arnold Forster, Paul Hartman, and Beverly Coleman for the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing et al.; by John Ligtenberg and Andrew J. Leahy for the American Federation of Teachers et al.; by James I. Huston for the Path Association; by William B. Ball for the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice et ah; by Charles H. Tuttle and Robert Walston Chubb for the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States et al.; by Edwin J. Lukas for the American Jewish Committee et al., and by Henry S. Reuss, pro se, and Phineas Indritz for Henry S. Reuss.

*412Brief of amici curiae, urging affirmance, was filed by George Washington Williams and Thomas F. Cadwalader for the Maryland Petition Committee, Inc., et al.

Mr. Justice Stewart

delivered the opinion of the Court.

In this case we are called upon to determine the scope and the constitutionality of an Act of Congress, 42 U. S. C. § 1982, which provides that:

“All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State and Territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.”

On September 2, 1965, the petitioners filed a complaint in the District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, alleging that the respondents had refused to sell them a home in the Paddock Woods community of St. Louis County for the sole reason that petitioner Joseph Lee Jones is a Negro. Relying in part upon § 1982, the petitioners sought injunctive and other relief.1 The District Court sustained the respondents' motion to dismiss the complaint,2 and the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed, concluding that § 1982 applies only to state action and does not reach private refusals to sell.3 We granted certiorari to consider the *413questions thus presented.4 For the reasons that follow, we reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals. We hold that § 1982 bars all racial discrimination, private as well as public, in the sale or rental of property, and that the statute, thus construed, is a valid exercise of the power of Congress to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment.5

I.

At the outset, it is important to make clear precisely what this case does not involve. Whatever else it may be, 42 U. S. C. § 1982 is not a comprehensive open housing law. In sharp contrast to the Fair Housing Title (Title VIII) of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Pub. L. 90-284, 82 Stat. 81, the statute in this case deals only with racial discrimination and does not address itself to discrimination on grounds of religion or national origin.6 It does not deal specifically with discrimination in the provision of services or facilities in connection with the sale or rental of a dwelling.7 It does not prohibit advertising or other representations that indicate discriminatory preferences.8 It does not refer explicitly to discrimination in financing arrangements 9 or in the provision of brokerage services.10 It does not empower *414a federal administrative agency to assist aggrieved parties.11 It makes no provision for intervention by the Attorney General.12 And, although it can be enforced by injunction,13 it contains no provision expressly authorizing a federal court to order the payment of damages.14

*415Thus, although § 1982 contains none of the exemptions that Congress included in the Civil Rights Act of 1968,15 it would be a serious mistake to suppose that § 1982 in any way diminishes the significance of the law recently enacted by Congress. Indeed, the Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs was informed in hearings held after the Court of Appeals had rendered its decision in this case that § 1982 might well be “a presently valid federal statutory ban against discrimination by private persons in the sale or lease of real property.” 16 The Subcommittee was told, however, that even if this Court should so construe § 1982, the existence of that statute would not “eliminate the need for congressional action” to spell out “responsibility on the part of the federal government to enforce the rights it protects.” 17 The point was made that, in light of the many difficulties *416confronted by private litigants seeking to enforce such rights on their own. “legislation is needed to establish federal machinery for enforcement of the rights guaranteed under Section 1982 of Title 42 even if the plaintiffs in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company should prevail in the United States Supreme Court.” 18

On April 10, 1968, Representative Kelly of New York focused the attention of the House upon the present case and its possible significance. She described the background of this litigation, recited the text of § 1982, and then added:

“When the Attorney General was asked in court about the effect of the old law [§ 1982] as compared with the pending legislation which is being considered on the House floor today, he said that the scope was somewhat different, the remedies and procedures were different, and that the new law was still quite necessary.” 19

Later the same day, the House passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Its enactment had no effect upon § 198220 *417and no effect upon this litigation,21 but it underscored the vast differences between, on the one hand, a general statute applicable only to racial discrimination in the rental and sale of property and enforceable only by private parties acting on their own initiative, and, on the other hand, a detailed housing law, applicable to a broad range of discriminatory practices and enforceable by a complete arsenal of federal authority. Having noted these differences, we turn to a consideration of § 1982 itself.

II.

This Court last had occasion to consider the scope of 42 U. S. C. § 1982 in 1948, in Hurd v. Hodge, 334 U. S. 24. That case arose when property owners in the District of Columbia sought to enforce racially restrictive covenants against the Negro purchasers of several homes on their block. A federal district court enforced the restrictive agreements by declaring void the deeds of the Negro purchasers. It enjoined further attempts to sell or lease them the properties in question and directed them to “remove themselves and all of their personal belongings” from the premises within 60 days. The *418Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed,22 and this Court granted certiorari23 to decide whether § 1982, then § 1978 of the Revised Statutes of 1874, barred enforcement of the racially restrictive agreements in that case.

The agreements in Hurd covered only two-thirds of the lots of a single city block, and preventing Negroes from buying or renting homes in that specific area would not have rendered them ineligible to do so elsewhere in the city. Thus, if § 1982 had been thought to do no more than grant Negro citizens the legal capacity to buy and rent property free of prohibitions that wholly disabled them because of their race, judicial enforcement of the restrictive covenants at issue would not have violated § 1982. But this Court took a broader view of the statute. Although the covenants could have been enforced without denying the general right of Negroes to purchase or lease real estate, the enforcement of those covenant-s would nonetheless have denied the Negro purchasers “the same right ‘as is enjoyed by white citizens ... to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.’ ” 334 U. S., at 34. That result, this Court concluded, was prohibited by *419§ 1982. To suggest otherwise, the Court said, “is to reject the plain meaning of language.” Ibid.

Hurd v. Hodge, su-pra, squarely held, therefore, that a Negro citizen who is denied the opportunity to purchase the home he wants “[s]olely because of [his] race and color,” 334 U. S., at 34, has suffered the kind of injury that § 1982 was designed to prevent. Accord, Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U. S. 60, 79; Harmon v. Tyler, 273 U. S. 668; Richmond v. Deans, 281 U. S. 704. The basic source of the injury in Hurd was, of course, the action of private individuals — white citizens who had agreed to exclude Negroes from a residential area. But an arm of the Government — in that case, a federal court — had assisted in the enforcement of that agreement.24 Thus Hurd v. Hodge, supra, did not present the question whether purely private discrimination, unaided by any action on the part of government, would violate § 1982 if its effect were to deny a citizen the right to rent or buy property solely because of his race or color.

The only federal court (other than the Court of Appeals in this case) that has ever squarely confronted that question held that a wholly private conspiracy among white citizens to prevent a Negro from leasing a farm violated § 1982. United States v. Morris, 125 F. 322. It is true that a dictum in Hurd said that § 1982 was directed only toward “governmental action,” 334 U. S., at 31, but neither Hurd nor any other case *420before or since has presented that precise issue for adjudication in this Court.25 Today we face that issue for the first time.

III.

We begin with the language of the statute itself. In plain and unambiguous terms', § 1982 grants to all citizens, without regard to race or color, “the same right” to purchase and lease property “as is enjoyed by white citizens.” As the Court of Appeals in this case evidently recognized, that right can be impaired as effec*421tively by "those who place property on the market” 26 as by the State itself. For, even if the State and its agents lend no support to those who wish to exclude persons from their communities on racial grounds, the fact remains that, whenever property “is placed on the market for whites only, whites have a right denied to Negroes.” 27 So long as a Negro citizen who wants to buy or rent a home can be turned away simply because he is not white, he cannot be said to enjoy “the same right ... as is enjoyed by white citizens . . . to . . . purchase [and] lease . . . real and personal property.” 42 U. S. C. § 1982. (Emphasis added.)

On its face, therefore, § 1982 appears to prohibit all discrimination against Negroes in the sale or rental of property — discrimination by private owners as well as discrimination by public authorities. Indeed, even the respondents seem to concede that, if § 1982 “means what it says” — to use the words of the respondents’ brief— then it must encompass every racially motivated refusal *422to sell or rent and cannot be confined to officially sanctioned segregation in housing. Stressing what they consider to be the revolutionary implications of so literal a reading of § 1982, the respondents argue that Congress cannot possibly have intended any such result. Our examination of the relevant history, however, persuades us that Congress meant exactly what it said.

IY.

In its original form, 42 U. S. C. § 1982 was part of § 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.28 That section was cast in sweeping terms:

“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, . . . are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens, of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, . . . shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.”29

*423The crucial language for our purposes was that which guaranteed all citizens “the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, ... to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property ... as is enjoyed by white citizens . . . .” To the Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, it was clear that the right to do these things might be infringed not only by “State or local law” but also by “custom, or prejudice.” 30 Thus, when Congress provided in § 1 of the Civil Rights Act that the right to purchase and lease property was to be enjoyed equally throughout the United States by Negro and white citi*424zens alike, it plainly meant to secure that right against interference from any source whatever, whether governmental or private.31

Indeed, if § 1 had been intended to grant nothing more than an immunity from governmental interference, then much of § 2 would have made no sense at all.32 For that section, which provided fines and prison terms for certain *425individuals who deprived others of rights “secured or protected” by § 1, was carefully drafted to exempt private violations of § 1 from the criminal sanctions it imposed.33 There would, of course, have been no private violations to exempt if the only “right” granted by § 1 *426had been a right to be free of discrimination by public officials. Hence the structure of the 1866 Act, as well as its language, points to the conclusion urged by the petitioners in this case — that § 1 was meant to prohibit all racially motivated deprivations of the rights enumerated in the statute, although only those deprivations perpetrated “under color of law” were to be criminally punishable under § 2.

In attempting to demonstrate the contrary, the respondents rely heavily upon the fact that the Congress which approved the 1866 statute wished to eradicate the recently enacted Black Codes — laws which had saddled Negroes with “onerous disabilities and burdens, and curtailed their rights ... to such an extent that their freedom was of little value . . . .” Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 70.34 The respondents suggest that the only evil Congress sought to eliminate was that of racially discriminatory laws in the former Confederate States. But the Civil Rights Act was drafted to apply throughout the country,35 and its language was far *427broader than would have been necessary to strike down discriminatory statutes.

That broad language, we are asked to believe, was a mere slip of the legislative pen. We disagree. For the same Congress that wanted to do away with the Black Codes also had before it an imposing body of evidence pointing to the mistreatment of Negroes by private individuals and unofficial groups, mistreatment unrelated to any hostile state legislation. “Accounts in newspapers North and South, Freedmen’s Bureau and other official documents, private reports and correspondence were all adduced” to show that “private outrage and atrocity” were “daily inflicted on freedmen . . . .” 36 The congressional debates are replete with references to private injustices against Negroes — references to white employers who refused to pay their Negro workers,37 white planters who agreed among themselves not to hire freed slaves without the permission of their former masters,38 white *428citizens who assaulted Negroes39 or who combined to drive them out of their communities.40

Indeed, one of the most comprehensive studies then before Congress stressed the prevalence of private hostility toward Negroes and the need to protect them from the resulting persecution and discrimination.41 The report noted the existence of laws virtually prohibiting Negroes from owning or renting property in certain towns,42 but described such laws as “mere isolated cases,” representing “the local outcroppings of a spirit. . . found to prevail everywhere”43 — a spirit expressed, for example, *429by lawless acts of brutality directed against Negroes who traveled to areas where they were not wanted.44 The report concluded that, even if anti-Negro legislation were “repealed in all the States lately in rebellion,” equal treatment for the Negro would not yet be secured.45

In this setting, it would have been strange indeed if Congress had viewed its task as encompassing merely the nullification of racist laws in the former rebel States. That the Congress which assembled in the Nation’s capital in December 1865 in fact had a broader vision of the task before it became clear early in the session, when three proposals to invalidate discriminatory state statutes were rejected as “too narrowly conceived.”46 From the outset it seemed clear, at least to Senator Trumbull of Illinois, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that stronger legislation might prove necessary. After Senator Wilson of Massachusetts had introduced his bill to strike down all racially discriminatory laws in the South,47 Senator Trumbull said this:

“I reported from the Judiciary Committee the second section of the [Thirteenth Amendment] for the very purpose of conferring upon Congress authority to see that the first section was carried out *430in good faith . . . and I hold that under that second section Congress will have the authority, when the constitutional amendment is adopted, not only to pass the hill of the Senator from Massachusetts, but a bill that will be much more efficient to protect the freedman in his rights. . . . And, sir, when the constitutional amendment shall have been adopted, if the information from the South be that the men whose liberties are secured by it are deprived of the privilege to go and come when they please, to buy and sell when they please, to make contracts and enforce contracts, I give notice that, if no one else does, I shall introduce a bill and urge its passage through Congress that will secure to those men every one of these rights: they would not be freemen without them. It is idle to say that a man is free who cannot go and come at pleasure, who cannot buy and sell, who cannot enforce his rights. ... [So] when the constitutional amendment is adopted I trust we may pass a bill, if the action of the people in the southern States should make it necessary, that will be much more sweeping and efficient than the bill under consideration.”48

*431Five days later, on December 18, 1865, the Secretary of State officially certified the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. The next day Senator Trumbull again rose to speak. He had decided, he said, that the “more sweeping and efficient” bill of which he had spoken previously ought to be enacted

“at an early day for the purpose of quieting apprehensions in the minds of many friends of freedom lest by local legislation or a prevailing public sentiment in some of the States persons of the African race should continue to be oppressed and in fact deprived of their freedom . . . .”49

On January 5, 1866, Senator Trumbull introduced the bill he had in mind — the bill which later became the Civil Rights Act of 1866.50 He described its objectives in terms that belie any attempt to read it narrowly:

“Mr. President, I regard the bill to which the attention of the Senate is now called as the most important measure that has been under its consideration since the adoption of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. . That- amendment declared that all persons in the United States should be free. This measure is intended to give effect to that declaration and secure to all persons within the United States practical freedom. There is very little importance in the general declaration of abstract truths and principles unless they can be carried into effect, unless the persons who are to be *432affected by them have some means of availing themselves of their benefits.” 51

Of course, Senator Trumbull’s bill would, as he pointed out, “destroy all [the] discriminations” embodied in the Black Codes,52 but it would do more: It would affirmatively secure for all men, whatever their race or color, what the Senator called the “great fundamental rights” :

“the right to acquire property, the right to go and come at pleasure, the right to enforce rights in the courts, to make contracts, and to inherit and dispose of property.” 53

As to those basic civil rights, the Senator said, the bill would “break down all discrimination between black men and white men.” 54

*433That the bill would indeed have so sweeping an effect was seen as its great virtue by its friends 55 and as its great danger by its enemies 56 but was disputed by none. Opponents of the bill charged that it would not only regulate state laws but would directly “determine the persons who [would] enjoy . . . property within the States,”57 threatening the ability of white citizens “to determine who [would] be members of [their] communit[ies] . . . .”58 The bill’s advocates did not deny the accuracy of those characterizations. Instead, they defended the propriety of employing federal authority to deal with “the white man . . . [who] would invoke the power of local prejudice” against the Negro.59 Thus, when the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act on February 2, 1866,60 it did so fully aware of the breadth of the measure it had approved.

In the House, as in the Senate, much was said about eliminating the infamous Black Codes.61 But, like the Senate, the House was moved by a larger objective— that of giving real content to the freedom guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Representative Thayer of Pennsylvania put it this way:

“[W]hen I voted for the amendment to abolish slavery ... I did not suppose that I was offer*434ing ... a mere paper guarantee. And when I voted for the second section of the amendment, I felt . . . certain that I had . . . given to Congress ability to protect . . . the rights which the first section gave . . .

“The bill which now engages the attention of the House has for its object to carry out and guaranty the reality of that great measure. It is to give to it practical effect and force. It is to prevent that great measure from remaining a dead letter upon the constitutional page of this country. . . . The events of the last four years . . . have changed [a] large class of people . . . from a condition of slavery to that of freedom. The practical question now to be decided is whether they shall be in fact freemen. It is whether they shall have the benefit of this great charter of liberty given to them by the American people.”62

Representative Cook of Illinois thought that, without appropriate federal legislation, any “combination of men in [a] neighborhood [could] prevent [a Negro] from having any chance” to enjoy those benefits.63 To Congressman Cook and others like him, it seemed evident that, with respect to basic civil rights — including the “right to . . . purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey . . . property," Congress must provide that “there ... be no discrimination” on grounds of race or color.64

*435It thus appears that, when the House passed the Civil Rights Act on March 13, 1866,65 it did so on the same assumption that had prevailed in the Senate: It too believed that it was approving a comprehensive statute forbidding all racial discrimination affecting the basic civil rights enumerated in the Act.

President Andrew Johnson vetoed the Act on March 27,66 and in the brief congressional debate that followed, his supporters characterized its reach in all-embracing terms. One stressed the fact that § 1 would confer “the right ... to purchase . . . real estate . . . without any qualification and without any restriction whatever 67 Another predicted, as a corollary, that the Act would preclude preferential treatment for white persons in the rental of hotel rooms and in the sale of church pews.68 Those observations elicited no reply. On April 6 the Senate, and on April 9 the House, overrode the President's veto by the requisite majorities,69 and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 became law.70

*436In light of the concerns that led Congress to adopt it and the contents of the debates that preceded its passage, it is clear that the Act was designed to do just what its terms suggest: to prohibit all racial discrimination, whether or not under color of law, with respect to the rights enumerated therein — including the right to purchase or lease property.

Nor was the scope of the 1866 Act altered when it was re-enacted in 1870, some two years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.71 It is quite true that some members of Congress supported the Fourteenth Amendment “in order to eliminate doubt as to the constitutional validity of the Civil Rights Act as applied to the States.” Hurd v. Hodge, 334 U. S. 24, 32-33. But it certainly does not follow that the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment or the subsequent readoption of the Civil Rights Act were meant somehow to limit its application to state action. The legislative history furnishes not the slightest factual basis for any such speculation, and the conditions prevailing in 1870 make it highly implausible. For by that time most, if not all, of the former Confederate States, then under the control of “reconstructed” legislatures, had formally repudiated racial discrimination, and the focus of congressional concern had clearly shifted from hostile statutes to the activities of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, operating wholly outside the law.72

*437Against this background, it would obviously make no sense to assume, without any historical support whatever, that Congress made a silent decision in 1870 to exempt private discrimination from the operation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.73 “The cardinal rule is that repeals by implication are not favored.” Posadas v. National City Bank, 296 U. S. 497, 503. All Congress said in 1870 was that the 1866 law “is hereby re-enacted.” That is all Congress meant.

As we said in a somewhat different setting two Terms ago, “We think that history leaves no doubt that, if we are to give [the law] the scope that its origins dictate, we must accord it a sweep as broad as its language.” United States v. Price, 383 U. S. 787, 801. “We are not at liberty to seek ingenious analytical instruments,” ibid., to carve from § 1982 an exception for private conduct — even though its application to such conduct in the present context is without established precedent. And, as the Attorney General of the United States said at the oral argument of this case, “The fact that the statute lay partially dormant for many years cannot be held to diminish its force today.”

Y.

The remaining question is whether Congress has power under the Constitution to do what § 1982 purports to do: to prohibit all racial discrimination, private and public, in the sale and rental of property. Our starting point is the Thirteenth Amendment, for it was pursuant *438to that constitutional provision that Congress originally enacted what is now § 1982. The Amendment consists of two parts. Section 1 states:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Section 2 provides:

“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

As its text reveals, the Thirteenth Amendment “is not a mere prohibition of State laws establishing or upholding slavery, but an absolute declaration that slavery or involuntary servitude shall not exist in any part of the United States.” Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 20. It has never been doubted, therefore, “that the power vested in Congress to enforce the article by appropriate legislation,” ibid., includes the power to enact laws “direct and primary, operating upon the acts of individuals, whether sanctioned by State legislation or not.” Id., at 23.74

Thus, the fact that § 1982 operates upon the unofficial acts of private individuals, whether or not sanctioned by state law, presents no constitutional problem. If Congress has power under the Thirteenth Amendment to eradicate conditions that prevent Negroes from buying and renting property because of their race or color, then no federal statute calculated to achieve that objective *439can be thought to exceed the constitutional power of Congress simply because it reaches beyond state action to regulate the conduct of private individuals. The constitutional question in this case, therefore, comes to this: Does the authority of Congress to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment “by appropriate legislation” include the power to eliminate all racial barriers to the acquisition of real and personal property? We think the answer to that question is plainly yes.

“By its own unaided force and effect,” the Thirteenth Amendment “abolished slavery, and established universal freedom.” Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 20. Whether or not the Amendment itself did any more than that— a question not involved in this case — it is at least clear that the Enabling Clause of that Amendment empowered Congress to do much more. For that clause clothed “Congress with power to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United StatesIbid. (Emphasis added.)

Those who opposed passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 argued in effect that the Thirteenth Amendment merely authorized Congress to dissolve the legal bond by which the Negro slave was held to his master.75 Yet many had earlier opposed the Thirteenth Amendment on the very ground that it would give Congress virtually unlimited power to enact laws for the protection of Negroes in every State.76 And the majority leaders in Congress — who were, after all, the authors of the Thirteenth Amendment — had no doubt that its Enabling Clause contemplated the sort of positive legislation that *440was embodied in the 1866 Civil Rights Act. Their chief spokesman, Senator Trumbull of Illinois, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, had brought the Thirteenth Amendment to the floor of the Senate in 1864. In defending the constitutionality of the 1866 Act, he argued that, if the narrower construction of the Enabling Clause were correct, then

“the trumpet of freedom that we have been blowing throughout the land has given an 'uncertain sound/ and the promised freedom is a delusion. Such was not the intention of Congress, which proposed the constitutional amendment, nor is such the fair meaning of the amendment itself. ... I have no doubt that under this provision ... we may destroy all these discriminations in civil rights against the black man; and if we cannot, our constitutional amendment amounts to nothing. It was for that purpose that the second clause of that amendment was adopted, which says that Congress shall have authority, by appropriate legislation, to carry into effect the article prohibiting slavery. Who is to decide what that appropriate legislation is to be? The Congress of the United States; and it is for Congress to adopt such appropriate legislation as it may think proper, so that it be a means to accomplish the end.”77

Surely Senator Trumbull was right. Surely Congress has the power under the Thirteenth Amendment rationally to determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery, and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation. Nor can we say that the determination Congress has made is an irrational *441one. For this Court recognized long ago that, whatever else they may have encompassed, the badges and incidents of slavery — its “burdens and disabilities” — included restraints upon “those fundamental rights which are the essence of civil freedom, namely, the same right ... to inherit, purchase, lease, sell and convey property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.” Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 22.78 Just as the Black Codes, enacted after the Civil *442War to restrict the free exercise of those rights, were substitutes for the slave system, so the exclusion of Negroes from white communities became a substitute for the Black Codes. And when racial discrimination herds men *443into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin, then it too is a relic of slavery.

Negro citizens, North and South, who saw in the Thirteenth Amendment a promise of freedom — freedom to “go and come at pleasure” 79 and to “buy and sell when they please” 80 — would be left with “a mere paper guarantee” 81 if Congress were powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of a Negro will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a white man. At the very least, the freedom that Congress is empowered to secure under the Thirteenth Amendment includes the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live. If Congress cannot say that being a free man means at least this much, then the Thirteenth Amendment made a promise the Nation cannot keep.

Representative Wilson of Iowa was the floor manager in the House for the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In urging that Congress had ample authority to pass the pending bill, he recalled the celebrated words of Chief Justice Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 421:

“Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.” 82

“The end is legitimate,” the Congressman said, “because it is defined by the Constitution itself. The end is the *444maintenance of freedom .... A man who enjoys the civil rights mentioned in this bill cannot be reduced to slavery. . . . This settles the appropriateness of this measure, and that settles its constitutionality.” 83 We agree. The judgment is

Reversed.

1

To vindicate their rights under 42 U. S. C. § 1982, the petitioners invoked the jurisdiction of the District Court to award “damages or . . . equitable or other relief under any Act of Congress providing for the protection of civil rights . . . .” 28 U. S. C. § 1343 (4). In such cases, federal jurisdiction does not require that the amount in controversy exceed $10,000. Cf. Douglas v. City of Jeannette, 319 U. S. 157, 161; Hague v. C. I. O., 307 U. S. 496, 507-514, 527-532.

2

255 F. Supp. 115.

3

379 F. 2d 33.

4

389 U. S. 968.

5

Because we have concluded that the discrimination alleged in the petitioners’ complaint violated a federal statute that Congress had the power to enact under the Thirteenth Amendment, we find it unnecessary to decide whether that discrimination also violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

6

Contrast the Civil Rights Act of 1968, § 804 (a).

7

Contrast § 804 (b).

8

Contrast §§804 (c), (d), (e).

9

Contrast §805.

10

Contrast § 806. In noting that 42 U. S. C. § 1982 differs from the Civil Rights Act of 1968 in not dealing explicitly and exhaustively with such matters (see also nn. 7 and 9, supra), we intimate *414no view upon the question whether ancillary services or facilities of this sort might in some situations constitute “property” as that term is employed in § 1982. Nor do we intimate any view upon the extent to which discrimination in the provision of such services might be barred by 42 U. S. C. § 1981, the text of which appears in n. 78, infra.

11

Contrast the Civil Rights Act of 1968, §§ 808-811.

12

Contrast § 813 (a).

13

The petitioners in this case sought an order requiring the respondents to sell them a “Hyde Park” type of home on Lot No. 7147, or on “some other lot in [the] subdivision sufficient to accommodate the home selected . . . .” They requested that the respondents be enjoined from disposing of Lot No. 7147 while litigation was pending, and they asked for a permanent injunction against future discrimination by the respondents “in the sale of homes in the Paddock Woods subdivision.” The fact that 42 U. S. C. § 1982 is couched in declaratory terms and provides no explicit method of enforcement does not, of course, prevent a federal court from fashioning an effective equitable remedy. See, e. g., Texas & N. O. R. Co. v. Ry. Clerks, 281 U. S. 548, 568-570; Deckert v. Independence Corp., 311 U. S. 282, 288; United States v. Republic Steel Corp., 362 U. S. 482, 491-492; J. I. Case Co. v. Borak, 377 U. S. 426, 432-435. Cf. Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123; Griffin v. School Board, 377 U. S. 218.

14

Contrast the Civil Rights Act of 1968, § 812 (c). The complaint in this case alleged that the petitioners had “suffered actual damages in the amount of $50.00,” but no facts were stated to support or explain that allegation. Upon receiving the injunctive relief to which they are entitled, see n. 13, supra, the petitioners will presumably be able to purchase a home from the respondents at the price prevailing at the time of the wrongful refusal in 1965— substantially less, the petitioners concede, than the current market value of the property in question. Since it does not appear that the petitioners will then have suffered any uncompensated injury, we need not decide here whether, in some circumstances, a party *415aggrieved by a violation of § 1982 might properly assert an implied right to compensatory damages. Cf. Texas & Pacific R. Co. v. Rigsby, 241 U. S. 33, 39-40; Steele v. Louisville & N. R. Co., 323 U. S. 192, 207; Wyandotte Transportation Co. v. United States, 389 U. S. 191, 202, 204. See generally Bell v. Hood, 327 U. S. 678, 684. See also 42 U. S. C. § 1988. In no event, on the facts alleged in the present complaint, would the petitioners be entitled to punitive damages. See Philadelphia, Wilmington, & Baltimore R. Co. v. Quigley, 21 How. 202, 213-214. Cf. Barry v. Edmunds, 116 U. S. 550, 562-565; Wills v. Trans World Airlines, Inc., 200 F. Supp. 360, 367-368. We intimate no view, however, as to what damages might be awarded in a case of this sort arising in the future under the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

15

See §§803 (b), 807.

16

Hearings on S. 1358, S. 2114, and S. 2280 before the Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., 229. These hearings were a frequent point of reference in the debates preceding passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. See, e. g., 114 Cong. Rec. S1387 (Feb. 16, 1968), S1453 (Feb. 20, 1968), S1641 (Feb. 26, 1968), S1788 (Feb. 27, 1968).

17

Hearings, supra, n. 16, at 229.

18

Id., at 230. See also id., at 129, 162-163, 251. And see Hearings on S. 1026, S. 1318, S. 1359, S. 1362, S. 1462, H. R. 2516, and H. R. 10805 before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., 416.

19

114 Cong. Reo. H2807 (April 10, 1968). See also id., at H2808. The Attorney General of the United States stated during the oral argument in this case that the Civil Rights Act then pending in Congress “would provide open housing rights on a complicated statutory scheme, including administrative, judicial, and other sanctions for its effectuation . . . .” “Its potential for effectiveness,” he added, “is probably much greater than [§ 1982] because of the sanctions and the remedies that it provides.”

20

At oral argument, the Attorney General expressed the view that, if Congress should enact the pending bill, § 1982 would not be affected in any way but “would stand independently.” That is, of course, correct. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 does not mention 42 U. S. C. § 1982, and we cannot assume that Congress intended *417to effect any change, either substantive or procedural, in the prior statute. See United States v. Borden Co., 308 U. S. 188, 198-199. See also §815 of the 1968 Act: “Nothing in this title shall be construed to invalidate or limit any law of . . . any . . . jurisdiction in which this title shall be effective, that grants, guarantees, or protects the . . . rights . . . granted by this title . . .

21

On April 22, 1968, we requested the views of the parties as to what effect, if any, the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 had upon this litigation. The parties and the Attorney General, representing the United States as amicus cuñae, have informed us that the respondents' housing development will not be covered by the 1968 Act until January 1, 1969; that, even then, the Act will have no application to cases where, as here, the alleged discrimination occurred prior to April 11, 1968, the date on which the Act *418became law; and that, if the Act were deemed applicable to such cases, the petitioners’ claim under it would nonetheless be barred by the 180-day limitation period of §§ 810 (b) and 812 (a).

Nor did the passage of the 1968 Act after oral argument in this ease furnish a basis for dismissing the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted. Rice v. Sioux City Cemetery, 349 U. S. 70, relied upon in dissent, post, .at 479, was quite unlike this case, for the statute that belatedly came to the Court’s attention in Rice reached precisely the same situations that would have been covered by a decision in this Court sustaining the petitioner’s claim on the merits. The coverage of § 1982, however, is markedly different from that of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

22

82 U. S. App. D. C. 180, 162 F. 2d 233.

23

332 U. S. 789.

24

Compare Harmon v. Tyler, 273 U. S. 668, invalidating a New Orleans ordinance which gave legal force to private discrimination by forbidding any Negro to establish a home in a white community, or any white person to establish a home in a Negro community, “except on the written consent of a majority of the persons of the opposite race inhabiting such community or portion of the City to be affected.” See Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U. S. 1, 12.

25

Two of this Court’s early opinions contain dicta to the general effect that § 1982 is limited to state action. Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 317-318; Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 16-17. But all that Virginia v. Rives, supra, actually held was that § 641 of the Revised Statutes of 1874 (derived from § 3 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and currently embodied in 28 U. S. C. § 1443 (1)) did not authorize the removal of a state prosecution where the defendants, without pointing to any statute discriminating against Negroes, could only assert that a denial of their rights might take place and might go uncorrected at trial. 100 U. S., at 319-322. See Georgia v. Rachel, 384 U. S. 780, 797-804. And of course the Civil Rights Cases, supra, which invalidated §§ 1 and 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, 18 Stat. 335, did not'involve the present statute at all.

It is true that a dictum in Hurd v. Hodge, 334 U. S. 24, 31, characterized Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U. S. 323, as having “held” that “[t]he action toward which the provisions of the statute . . . [are] directed is governmental action.” 334 U. S., at 31. But no such statement appears in the Corrigan opinion, and a careful examination of Corrigan reveals that it cannot be read as authority for the proposition attributed to it in Hurd. In Corrigan, suits had been brought to enjoin a threatened violation of certain restrictive covenants in the District of Columbia. The courts of the District had granted relief, see 55 App. D. C. 30, 299 F. 899, and the case reached this Court on appeal. As the opinion in Corrigan specifically recognized, no claim that the covenants could not validly be enforced against the appellants had been raised in the lower courts, and no such claim was properly before this Court. 271 U. S., at 330-331. The only question presented for decision was whether the restrictive covenants themselves violated the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and §§ 1977, 1978, and 1979 of the Revised Statutes *421(now 42 U. S. C. §§ 1981, 1982, and 1983). Ibid. Addressing itself to that narrow question, the Court said that none of the provisions relied upon by the appellants prohibited private individuals from “enter[ing] into . . . [contracts] in respect to the control and disposition of their own property.” Id., at 331. Nor, added the Court, had the appellants even claimed that the provisions in question “had, in and of themselves, . . . [the] effect” of prohibiting such contracts. Ibid.

Even if Corrigan should be regarded as an adjudication that 42 U. S. C. § 1982 (then § 1978 of the Revised Statutes) does not prohibit private individuals from agreeing not to sell their property to Negroes, Corrigan would not settle the question whether § 1982 prohibits an actual refusal to sell to a Negro. Moreover, since the appellants in Corrigan had not even argued in this Court that the statute prohibited private agreements of the sort there involved, it would be a mistake to treat the Corrigan decision as a considered judgment even on that narrow issue.

26

379 F. 2d 33, 43.

27

Ibid.

28

Act of April 9, 1866, c. 31, § 1, 14 Stat. 27, re-enacted by § 18 of the Enforcement Act of 1870, Act of May 31, 1870, c. 114, § 18, 16 Stat. 140, 144, and codified in §§ 1977 and 1978 of the Revised Statutes of 1874, now 42 U. S. C. §§ 1981 and 1982. For the text of § 1981, see n. 78, infra.

29

It is, of course, immaterial that § 1 ended with the words “any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary not*423withstanding.” The phrase was obviously inserted to qualify the reference to “like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other,” thus emphasizing the supremacy of the 1866 statute over inconsistent state or local laws, if any. It was deleted, presumably as surplusage, in § 1978 of the Revised Statutes of 1874. "

30

Several weeks before the House began its debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Congress had passed a bill (S. 60) to enlarge the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau (created by Act of March 3, 1865, c. 90, 13 Stat. 507) by extending military jurisdiction over certain areas in the South where, “in consequence of any State or local law, . . . custom, or prejudice, any of the civil rights . . . belonging to white persons (including the right ... to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property . . .) are refused or denied to negroes ... on account of race, color, or any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude . . . .” See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 129, 209. (Emphasis added.) Both Houses had passed S. 60 (see id., at 421, 688, 748, 775), and although the Senate had failed to override the President’s veto (see id., at 915-916, 943) the bill was nonetheless significant for its recognition that the “right to purchase” was a right that could be “refused or denied” by “custom or prejudice” as well as by “State or local law.” See also the text accompanying nn. 49 and 59, infra. Of course an “abrogation of civil rights made ‘in consequence of . . . custom, or prejudice’ might as easily be perpetrated by private individuals or by unofficial community activity as by state officers armed with statute or ordinance.” J. tenBroek, Equal Under Law 179 (1965 ed.).

31

When Congressman Bingham of Ohio spoke of the Civil Rights Act, he charged that it would duplicate the substantive scope of the bill recently vetoed by the President, see n. 30, supra, and that it would extend the territorial reach of that bill throughout the United States. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1292. Although the Civil Rights Act, as the dissent notes, post, at 457, 462, made no explicit reference to “prejudice,” cf. n. 30, supra, the fact remains that nobody who rose to answer the Congressman disputed his basic premise that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 would prohibit every form of racial discrimination encompassed by the earlier bill the President had vetoed. Even Senator Trumbull of Illinois, author of the vetoed measure as well as of the Civil Rights Act, had previously remarked that the latter was designed to “extend to all parts of the country,” on a permanent basis, the “equal civil rights” which were to have been secured in rebel territory by the former, id,., at 322, to the end that “all the badges of servitude ... be abolished.” Id., at 323. (Emphasis added.)

32

Section 2 provided:

“That any person who, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, shall subject, or cause to be subjected, any inhabitant of any State or Territory to the deprivation of any right secured or protected by this act, or to different punishment, pains, or penalties on account of such person having at any time been held in a condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, or by reason of his color or race, than is prescribed for the punishment of white persons, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction, shall be punished by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or imprisonment not exceeding one year, or both, in the discretion of the court.” (Emphasis added.)

For the evolution of this provision into 18 U. S. C. § 242, see Screws v. United States, 325 U. S. 91, 98-99; United States v. Price, 383 U. S. 787, 804.

33

When Congressman Loan of Missouri asked the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Wilson of Iowa, “why [does] the committee limit the provisions of the second section to those who act under the color of law,” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1120, he was obviously inquiring why the second section did not also punish those who violated the first without acting “under the color of law.” Specifically, he asked:

“Why not let them [the penalties of § 2] apply to the whole community where the acts are committed?” Ibid.

Mr. Wilson’s reply was particularly revealing. If, as floor manager of the bill, he had viewed acts not under color of law as not violative of § 1 at all, that would of course have been the short answer to the Congressman’s query. Instead, Mr. Wilson found it necessary to explain that the Judiciary Committee did not want to make “a general criminal code for the States.” Ibid. Hence only those who discriminated “in reference to civil rights . . . under the color of . . . local laws” were made subject to the criminal sanctions of § 2. Ibid.

Congress might have thought it appropriate to confine criminal punishment to state officials, oath-bound to support the supreme federal law, while allowing only civil remedies — or perhaps only preventive relief — against private violators. Or Congress might have thought that States which did not authorize abridgment of the rights declared in § 1 would themselves punish all who interfered with those rights without official authority. See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1758, 1785. Cf. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 19, 24-25.

Whatever the reason, it was repeatedly stressed that the only violations “reached and punished” by the bill, see Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 1294 (emphasis added), would be those “done under color of State authority.” Ibid. It is observed in dissent, post, at 458, that Senator Trumbull told Senator Cowan that § 2 was directed not at “State officers especially, but [at] everybody who violates the law.” That remark, however, was nothing more than a reply to Senator Cowan’s charge that § 2 was “exceedingly objectionable” in singling out state judicial officers for punishment for the first time “in the history of civilized legislation.” Id., at 500.

34

See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 39, 474, 516-517, 602-603, 1123-1125, 1151-1153, 1160. For the substance of the codes and their operation, see H. R. Exec. Doc. No. 118, 39th Cong., 1st Sess.; S. Exec. Doc. No. 6, 39th Cong., 2d Sess.; 1 W. Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction 273-312 (1906); E. McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction 29-44 (1871); 2 S. Morison and H. Com-mager, The Growth of the American Republic 17-18 (1950 ed.); K. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction 79-81 (1965).

35

See n. 31, supra. It is true, as the dissent emphasizes, post, at 460, that Senator Trumbull remarked at one point that the Act “could have no operation in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, or most of the States of the Union/' whose laws did not themselves discriminate against Negroes. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1761. But the Senator was simply observing that the Act would “in no manner [interfere] with the . . . regulations of any State which protects all alike in their rights of person and property.” Ibid. See also id., at 476, 505, 600. That is, the Act would have *427no effect upon nondiscriminatory legislation. Senator Trumbull obviously could not have meant that the law would apply to racial discrimination in some States but not in others, for the bill on its face applied upon its enactment “in every State and Territory in the United States,” and no one disagreed when Congressman Bingham complained that, unlike Congress’ recently vetoed attempt to expand the Freedmen’s Bureau, see n. 30, supra, the Civil Rights Act would operate “in every State of the Union.” Id., at 1292. Nor, contrary to a suggestion made in dissent, post, at 460, was the Congressman speaking only of the Act’s potential operation in any State that might enact a racially discriminatory law in the future. The Civil Rights Act, Congressman Bingham insisted, would “be enforced in every State . . . [at] the present . . . time.” Ibid. (Emphasis added.)

36

J. tenBroek, supra, n. 30, at 181. See also W. Brock, An American Crisis 124 (1963); J. McPherson, The Struggle For Equality 332 (1964); K. Stampp, supra, n. 34, at 75, 131-132.

37

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 95, 1833.

38

Id., at 1160.

39

Id., at 339-340, 1160, 1835. It is true, as the dissent notes, post, at 462, that some of the references to private assaults occurred during debate on the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, n. 30, supra, but the congressional discussion proceeded upon the understanding that all discriminatory conduct reached by the Freedmen’s Bureau bill would be reached as well by the Civil Rights Act. See, e. g., n. 31, supra.

40

Id., at 1835. It is clear that these instances of private mistreatment, see also text accompanying n. 41, infra, were understood as illustrative of the evils that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 would correct. Congressman Eldridge of Wisconsin, for example, said this: “Gentlemen refer us to individual cases of wrong perpetrated upon the freedmen of the South as an argument why we should extend the Federal authority into the different States to control the action of the citizens thereof. But, I ask, has not the South submitted to the altered state of things there, to the late amendment of the Constitution, to the loss of their slave property, with a cheerfulness and grace that we did not expect? ... I deprecate all these measures because of the implication they carry upon their face that the people who have heretofore owned slaves intend to do them wrong. I do not believe it. . . . The cases of ill-treatment are exceptional cases/' Id., at 1156.

So it was that “opponents denied or minimized the facts asserted” but “did not contend that the [Civil Rights Act] would not reach such facts if they did exist.” J. tenBroek, supra, n. 30, at 181.

41

Report of C. Schurz, S. Exec. Doc. No. 2, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2, 17-25. See W. Brock, supra, n. 36, at 40-42; K. Stampp, supra, n. 34, at 73-75.

42

Report of C. Schurz, supra, at 23-24.

43

Id., at 25.

44

Id., at 18.

45

Id., at 35.

46

J. tenBroek, swpra, n. 30, at 177. One of the proposals, sponsored by Senator Wilson of Massachusetts, would have declared void all “laws, statutes, acts, ordinances, rules, and regulations” establishing or maintaining in former rebel States “any inequality of civil rights and immunities” on account of “color, race, or ... a previous condition ... of slavery.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 39. The other two proposals, sponsored by Senator Sumner of Massachusetts, would have struck down in the former Confederate States “all laws . . . establishing any oligarchical privileges and any distinction of rights on account of color or race” and would have required that all persons there be “recognized as equal before the law.” Id., at 91.

47

See n. 46, supra.

48

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 43. (Emphasis added.) The dissent seeks to neutralize the impact of this quotation by noting that, prior to making the above statement, the Senator had argued that the second clause of the Thirteenth Amendment was inserted “for the purpose, and none other, of preventing State Legislatures from enslaving, under any pretense, those whom the first clause declared should be free.” See post, at 455, 462-463. In fact, Senator Trumbull was simply replying at that point to the contention of Senator Saulsbury of Delaware that the second clause of the Thirteenth Amendment was never intended to authorize federal legislation interfering with subjects other than slavery itself. See id., at 42. Senator Trumbull responded that the clause was intended to authorize precisely such legislation. That, “and none other," he said for emphasis, was its avowed purpose. But Senator Trumbull did not imply that the force of § 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment would be *431spent once Congress had nullified discriminatory state laws. On the contrary, he emphasized the fact that it was “for Congress to determine, and nobody else,” what sort of legislation might be “appropriate” to make the Thirteenth Amendment effective. Id., at 43. Cf. Part V of this opinion, infra.

49

Id., at 77. (Emphasis added.)

50

Id., at 129.

51

Id., at 474.

52

Ibid. See the dissenting opinion, post, at 458.

53

Id., at 475.

54

Id., at 599. (Emphasis added.) Senator Trumbull later observed that his bill would add nothing to federal authority if the States would fully “perform their constitutional obligations.” Id., at 600. See also Senator Trumbull’s remarks, id., at 1758; the remarks of Senator Lane of Indiana, id., at 602-603; and the remarks of Congressman Wilson of Iowa, id., at 1117-1118. But it would be a serious mistake to infer from such statements any notion (see the dissenting opinion, post, at 460) that, so long as the States refrained from actively discriminating against Negroes, their “obligations” in this area, as Senator Trumbull and others understood them, would have been fulfilled. For the Senator’s concern, it will be recalled (see text accompanying n. 49, supra), was that Negroes might be “oppressed and in fact deprived of their freedom” not only by hostile laws but also by “prevailing public sentiment,” and he viewed his bill as necessary “unless by local legislation they [the States] provide for the real freedom of their former slaves.” Id., at 77. See also id., at 43. And see the remarks of Congressman Lawrence of Ohio:

“Now, there are two ways in which a State may undertake to deprive citizens of these absolute, inherent, and inalienable rights: either by *433prohibitory laws, or by a failure to protect any one of them.” Id., at 1833.

55

See, e. g., the remarks of Senator Howard of Michigan. Id., at 504.

56

See, e. g., the remarks of Senator Cowan of Pennsylvania, id., at 500, and the remarks of Senator Hendricks of Indiana. Id., at 601.

57

Senator Saulsbury of Delaware. Id., at 478.

58

Senator Yan Winkle of West Virginia. Id., at 498.

59

Senator Lane of Indiana. Id., at 603.

60

Id., at 606-607.

61

See, e. g., id., at 1118-1119, 1123-1125, 1151-1153, 1160. See generally the discussion in the dissenting opinion, post, at 464-467.

62

Id., at 1151. (Emphasis added.)

63

Id., at 1124.

64

Ibid. (Emphasis added.) The clear import of these remarks is in no way diminished by the heated debate, see id., at 1290-1294, portions of which are quoted in the dissenting opinion, post, at 467-468, between Representative Bingham, opposing the bill, and Representative Shellabarger, supporting it, over the question of what kinds of state laws might be invalidated by § 1, a question not involved in this case.

65

Id., at 1367. On March 15, the Senate concurred in the several technical amendments that had been made by the House. Id., at 1413-1416.

66

Id., at 1679-1681.

67

Senator Cowan of Pennsylvania. Id., at 1781.

68

Senator Davis of Kentucky. Id., Appendix, at 183. Such expansive views of the Act’s reach found frequent and unchallenged expression in the Nation’s press. See, e. g., Daily National Intelli-gencer (Washington, D. C.), March 24, 1866, p. 2, col. 1; New York Herald, March 29, 1866, p. 4, col. 3; Cincinnati Commercial, March 30, 1866, p. 4, col. 2; Evening Post (New York), April 7, 1866, p. 2, col. 1; Indianapolis Daily Herald, April 17, 1866, p. 2, col. 1.

69

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1809, 1861.

70

“Never before had Congress over-ridden a President on a major political issue, and there was special gratification in feeling that this had not been done to carry some matter of material interest, such as a tariff, but in the cause of disinterested justice.” W. Brock, supra, n. 36, at 115.

71

Section 18 of the Enforcement Act of 1870, Act of May 31, 1870, c. 114, § 18, 16 Stat. 144:

“And be it further enacted, That the act to protect all persons in the United States in their civil rights, and furnish the means of their vindication, passed April nine, eighteen hundred and sixty-six, is hereby re-enacted . . . .”

72

See United States v. Mosley, 238 U. S. 383, 387-388; United States v. Price, 383 U. S. 787, 804-805; 2 W. Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction 285-288 (1907); K. Stampp, supra, n. 34, at 145, 171, 185, 198-204; G. Stephenson, Race Distinctions in American Law 116 (1910).

73

The Court of Appeals in this case seems to have derived such an assumption from language in Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 317-318, and Hurd v. Hodge, 334 U. S. 24, 31. See 379 F. 2d 33, 39-40, 43. Both of those opinions simply asserted that, at least after its re-enactment in 1870, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was directed only at governmental action. Neither opinion explained why that was thought to be so, and in each oase the statement was merely dictum. See n. 25, supra.

74

So it was, for example, that this Court unanimously upheld the power of Congress under the Thirteenth Amendment to make it a crime for one individual to compel another to work in order to discharge a debt. Clyatt v. United States, 197 U. S. 207.

75

See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 113, 318, 476, 499, 507, 576, 600-601.

76

See, e. g.. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., 1366, 2616, 2940-2941, 2962, 2986; Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2d Sess., 178-180, 182, 192, 195, 239, 241-242, 480-481, 529.

77

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 322. See also the remarks' of Senator Howard of Michigan. Id., at 503.

78

The Court did conclude in the Civil Rights Cases that “the act of . . . the owner of the inn, the public conveyance or place of amusement, refusing . . . accommodation” cannot be “justly regarded as imposing any badge of slavery or servitude upon the applicant.” 109 U. S., at 24. “It would be running the slavery argument into the ground,” the Court thought, “to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theatre, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business.” Id., at 24-25. Mr. Justice Harlan dissented, expressing the view that “such discrimination practised by corporations and individuals in the exercise of their public or quasi-public functions is a badge of servitude the imposition of which Congress may prevent under its power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment.” Id., at 43.

Whatever the present validity of the position taken by the majority on that issue — a question rendered largely academic by Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 78 Stat. 243 (see Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 379 U. S. 241; Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U. S. 294) — we note that the entire Court agreed upon at least one proposition: .The Thirteenth Amendment authorizes Congress not only to outlaw all forms of slavery and involuntary servitude but also to eradicate the last vestiges and incidents of a society half slave and half free, by securing to all citizens, of every race and color, “the same right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to inherit, purchase, lease, sell and convey property, as is enjoyed by white citizens.” 109 U. S., at 22. Cf. id., at 35 (dissenting opinion).

In Hodges v. United States, 203 U. S. 1, a group of white men had terrorized several Negroes to prevent them from working in a *442sawmill. The terrorizes were convicted under 18 U. S. C. § 241 (then Revised Statutes § 5508) of conspiring to prevent the Negroes from exercising the right to contract for employment, a right secured by 42 U. S. C. § 1981 (then Revised Statutes § 1977, derived from § 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, see n. 28, supra). Section 1981 provides, in terms that closely parallel those of § 1982 (then Revised Statutes § 1978), that all persons in the United States “shall have the same right ... to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens ...” (Emphasis added.)

This Court reversed the conviction. The majority recognized that "one of the disabilities of slavery, one of the indicia of its existence, was a lack of power to make or perform contracts.” 203 U. S., at 17. And there was no doubt that the defendants had deprived their Negro victims, on racial grounds, of the opportunity to dispose of their labor by contract. Yet the majority said that “no mere personal assault or trespass or appropriation operates to reduce the individual to a condition of slavery,” id., at 18, and asserted that only conduct which actually enslaves someone can be subjected to punishment under legislation enacted to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment. Contra, United States v. Cruikshank, 25 Fed. Cas. 707, 712 (No. 14,897) (dictum of Mr. Justice Bradley, on circuit), aff’d, 92 U. S. 542; United States v. Morris, 125 F. 322, 324, 330-331. Mr. Justice Harlan, joined by Mr. Justice Day, dissented. In their view, the interpretation the majority placed upon the Thirteenth Amendment was “entirely too narrow and . . . hostile to the freedom established by the supreme law of the land.” 203 U. S., at 37. That interpretation went far, they thought, “towards neutralizing many declarations made as to the object of the recent Amendments of the Constitution, a common purpose of which, this court has said, was to secure to a people theretofore in servitude, the free enjoyment, without discrimination merely on account of their race, of the essential rights that appertain to American citizenship and to freedom.” Ibid.

The conclusion of the majority in Hodges rested upon a concept of congressional power under the Thirteenth Amendment irrecon*443cilable with the position taken by every member of this Court in the Civil Rights Cases and incompatible with the history and purpose of the Amendment itself. Insofar as Hodges is inconsistent with our holding today, it is hereby overruled.

79

See text accompanying n. 48, supra.

80

Ibid.

81

See text accompanying n. 62, supra.

82

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1118.

83

Ibid.

Me. Justice Douglas,

concurring.

The Act of April 9, 1866,14 Stat. 27, 42 U. S .C. § 1982, provides: “All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State and Territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, aiid convey real and personal property.”

This Act was passed to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment which in § 1 abolished “slavery” and “involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” and in. § 2 gave Congress power “to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Enabling a Negro to buy and sell real and personal property is a removal of one of many badges of slavery.

“Slaves were not considered men. . . . They could own nothing; they could make no contracts; they could hold no property, nor traffic in property; they could not hire out; they could not legally marry nor constitute families; they could not control their children; they could not appeal from their master; they could be punished at will.” W. Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America 10 (1964) ,1

*445The true curse of slavery is not what it did to the black man, but what it has done to the white man. For the existence of the institution produced the notion that the white man was of superior character, intelligence, and morality. The blacks were little more than livestock— to be fed and fattened for the economic benefits they could bestow through their labors, and to be subjected to authority, often with cruelty, to make clear who was master and who slave.

Some badges of slavery remain today. While the institution has been outlawed, it has remained in the minds and hearts of many white men. Cases which have come to this Court depict a spectacle of slavery unwilling to die. We have seen contrivances by States designed to thwart Negro voting, e. g., Lane, v. Wilson, 307 U. S. 268. Negroes have been excluded over and again from juries solely on account of their race, e. g., Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, or have been forced to sit in segregated seats in courtrooms, Johnson v. Virginia, 373 U. S. 61. They have been made to attend segregated and inferior schools, e. g., Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, or been denied entrance to colleges or graduate schools because of their color, e. g., Pennsylvania v. Board of Trusts, 353 U. S. 230; Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U. S. 629. Negroes have been prosecuted for marrying whites, e. g., Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1. They have been forced to live in segregated residential districts, Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U. S. 60, and residents of white neighborhoods have denied them entrance, e. g., Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U. S. 1. Negroes have been forced to use segregated facilities in going about their daily lives, having been excluded from railway coaches, Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537; public parks, New Orleans Park Improvement Assn. v. Detiege, 358 U. S. 54; restaurants, Lombard v. Louisiana, 373 U. S. 267; public beaches, Mayor of Baltimore v. Dawson, 350 U. S. 877; municipal *446golf courses, Holmes v. City of Atlanta, 350 U. S. 879; amusement parks, Griffin v. Maryland, 378 U. S. 130; buses, Gayle v. Browder, 352 U. S. 903; public libraries, Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U. S. 131. A state court judge in Alabama convicted a Negro woman of contempt of court because she refused to answer him when he addressed her as “Mary,” although she had made the simple request to be called “Miss Hamilton.” Hamilton v. Alabama, 376 U. S. 650.

That brief sampling of discriminatory practices, many of which continue today, stands almost as an annotation to what Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) wrote nearly a century earlier:

“Of all the races and varieties of men which have suffered from this feeling, the colored people of this country have endured most. They can resort to no disguises which will enable them to escape its deadly aim. They carry in front the evidence which marks them for persecution. They stand at the extreme point of difference from the Caucasian race, and their African origin can be instantly recognized, though they may be several removes from the typical African race. They may remonstrate like Shylock— ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter, as a Christian is?’ — but such eloquence is unavailing. They are Negroes — and that is enough, in the eye of this unreasoning prejudice, to justify indignity and violence. In nearly every department of American life they are confronted by this insidious influence. It fills the air. It meets them at the workshop and factory, when they apply for work. It meets them at the church, at the hotel, at the *447ballot-box, and worst of all, it meets them in the jury-box. Without crime or offense against law or gospel, the colored man is the Jean Yaljean of American society. He has escaped from the galleys, and hence all presumptions are against him. The workshop denies him work, and the inn denies him shelter; the ballot-box a fair vote, and the jury-box a fair trial. He has ceased to be the slave of an individual, but has in some sense become the slave of society. He may not now be bought and sold like a beast in the market, but he is the trammeled victim of a prejudice, well calculated to repress his manly ambition, paralyze his energies, and make him a dejected and spiritless man, if not a sullen enemy to society, fit to prey upon life and property and to make trouble generally.” 2

Today the black is protected by a host of civil rights laws. But the forces of discrimination are still strong.

A member of his race, duly elected by the people to a state legislature, is barred from that assembly because of his views on the Vietnam war. Bond v. Floyd, 385 U. S. 116.

Real estate agents use artifice to avoid selling “white property” to the blacks.3 The blacks who travel the country, though entitled by law to the facilities for sleeping and dining that are offered all tourists, Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 379 U. S. 241, may well learn that the “vacancy” sign does not mean what it says, especially if the motel has a swimming pool.

On entering a half-empty restaurant they may find “reserved” signs on all unoccupied tables.

*448The black is often barred from a labor union because of his race.4

He learns that the order directing admission of his children into white schools has not been obeyed “with all deliberate speed/’ Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294, 301, but has been delayed by numerous stratagems and devices.5 State laws, at times, have even en*449couraged discrimination in housing. Reitman v. Mulkey, 387 U. S. 369.

This recital is enough to show how prejudices, once part and parcel of slavery, still persist. The men who sat in Congress in 1866 were trying to remove some of the badges or “customs” 6 of slavery when they enacted § 1982. And, as my Brother Stewart shows, the Congress that passed the so-called Open Housing Act in 1968 did not undercut any of the grounds on which § 1982 rests.

1

The cases are collected in five volumes in H. Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (1926-1937). And see 1 T. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, c. XIV (1858); G. Ostrander, The Rights of Man in America 1606-1861, p. 252 (1960); G. Stroud, Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery 45-50 (1827); J. Wheeler, Law of Slavery 190-191 (1837).

2

Excerpt from Frederick Douglass, The Color Line, The North American Review, June 1881, 4 The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass 343-344 (1955).

3

See Kamper v. Department of State of New York, 22 N. Y. 2d 690, 238 N. E. 2d 914.

4

See, e. g., O’Hanlon, The Case Against the Unions, Fortune, Jan. 1968, at 170.

5

The contrivances which some States have concocted to thwart the command of our decision in Brown v. Board of Education are by now legendary. See, e. g., Monroe v. Board of Commissioners, 391 U. S. 450 (Tennessee “free-transfer” plan); Green v. County School Board, 391 U. S. 430 (Virginia school board “freedom-of-choice” plan); Raney v. Board of Education, 391 U. S. 443 (Arkansas “freedom-of-choice” plan); Bradley v. School Board, 382 U. S. 103 (allocation of faculty allegedly on a racial basis); Griffin v. School Board, 377 U. S. 218 (closing of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, with tuition grants and tax concessions used to assist white children attending private segregated schools); Goss v. Board of Education, 373 U. S. 683 (Tennessee rezoning of school districts, with a transfer plan permitting transfer by students on the basis of race); United States v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 372 P. 2d 836, aff’d en banc, 380 F. 2d 385 (C. A. 5th Cir. 1967) (“freedom-of-choice” plans in States within the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit); Northcross v. Board of Education, 302 F. 2d 818 (C. A. 6th Cir. 1962) (Tennessee pupil-assignment law); Orleans Parish School Board v. Bush, 242 F. 2d 156 (C. A. 5th Cir. 1957) (Louisiana pupil-assignment law); Hall v. St. Helena Parish School Board, 197 F. Supp. 649 (D. C. E. D. La. 1961), aff’d, 368 U. S. 515 (Louisiana law permitting closing of public schools, with extensive state aid going to private segregated schools); Holmes v. Danner, 191 F. Supp. 394 (D. C. M. D. Ga. 1961) (Georgia statute cutting oil state funds if Negroes admitted to state university); Aaron v. McKinley, 173 F. Supp. 944 (D. C. E. D. Ark. 1959), aff’d sub nom. Faubus v. Aaron, 361 U. S. 197 (Arkansas statute cutting off state funds to integrated school districts); James v. Almond, 170 F. Supp. 331 (D. C. E. D. Va. 1959) (closing of all integrated public schools). See also Rogers v. Paul, 382 U. S. 198; Calhoun v. Latimer, 377 U. S. 263; Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1.

6

My Brother Harlan’s listing of some of the “customs” prevailing in the North at the time § 1982 was first enacted shows the extent of organized white discrimination against newly freed blacks. As he states, “ [residential segregation was the prevailing pattern almost everywhere in the North.” Post, at 474-475. Certainly, then, it was “customary.” To suggest, however, that there might be room for argument in this case (post, at 475, n. 65) that the discrimination against petitioners was not in some measure a part and product of this longstanding and widespread customary pattern is to pervert the problem by allowing the legal mind to draw lines and make distinctions that have no place in the jurisprudence of a nation striving to rejoin the human race.

Mr. Justice Harlan,

whom Mr. Justice White joins,

dissenting.

The decision in this case appears to me to be most ill-considered and ill-advised.

The petitioners argue that the respondents’ racially motivated refusal to sell them a house entitles them to judicial relief on two separate grounds. First, they claim that the respondents acted in violation of 42 U. S. C. § 1982; second, they assert that the respondents’ conduct amounted in the circumstances to “state action” 1 and was therefore forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment even in the absence of any statute. The Court, without *450reaching the second ground alleged, holds that the petitioners are entitled to relief under 42 U. S. C. § 1982, and that § 1982 is constitutional as legislation appropriate to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment.

For reasons which follow, I believe that the Court's construction of § 1982 as applying to purely private action is almost surely wrong, and at the least is open to serious doubt. The issues of the constitutionality of § 1982, as construed by the Court, and of liability under the Fourteenth Amendment alone, also present formidable difficulties. Moreover, the political processes of our own era have, since the date of oral argument in this case, given birth to a civil rights statute 2 embodying “fair housing” provisions 3 which would at the end of this year make available to others, though apparently not to the petitioners themselves,4 the type of relief which the petitioners now seek. It seems to me that this latter factor so diminishes the public importance of this case that by far the wisest course would be for this Court to refrain from decision and to dismiss the writ as improvidently granted.

I.

I shall deal first with the Court’s construction of § 1982, which lies at the heart of its opinion. That construction is that the statute applies to purely private as well as to state-authorized discrimination.

A.

The Court’s opinion focuses upon the statute’s legislative history, but it is worthy of note that the precedents in this Court are distinctly opposed to the Court’s view of the statute.

*451In the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, decided less than two decades after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, from which § 1982 is derived, the Court said in dictum of the 1866 Act:

“This law is clearly corrective in its character, intended to counteract and furnish redress against State laws and proceedings, and customs having the force of law, which sanction the wrongful acts specified. . . . The Civil Rights Bill here referred to is analogous in its character to what a law would have been under the original Constitution, declaring that the validity of contracts should not be impaired, and that if any person bound by a contract should refuse to comply with it, under color or pretence that it had been rendered void or invalid by a State law, he should be liable to an action upon it in the courts of the United States, with the addition of a penalty for setting up such an unjust and unconstitutional defence.” Id., at 16-17.5

In Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U. S. 323, the question was whether the courts of the District of Columbia might enjoin prospective breaches of racially restrictive covenants. The Court held that it was without jurisdiction to consider the petitioners’ argument that the covenant was void because it contravened the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments and their implementing statutes. The Court reasoned, inter alia, that the statutes, including the immediate predecessor of § 1982,6 were inapplicable because

“they, like the Constitutional Amendment under whose sanction they were enacted, do not in any manner prohibit or invalidate contracts entered into *452by private individuals in respect to the control and disposition of their own property.” Id., at 331.7

In Hurd v. Hodge, 334 U. S. 24, the issue was again whether the courts of the District might enforce racially restrictive covenants. At the outset of the process of reasoning by which it held that judicial enforcement of such a covenant would violate the predecessor of § 1982, the Court said:

“We may start with the proposition that the statute does not invalidate private restrictive agreements so long as the purposes of those agreements are achieved by the parties through voluntary adherence to the terms. The action toward which the provisions of the statute under consideration is [sic] directed is governmental action. Such was the holding of Corrigan v. Buckley ....’’ Id., at 31.8

B.

Like the Court, I begin analysis of § 1982 by examining its language. In its present form, the section provides:

“All citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State and Territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.”

The Court finds it “plain and unambiguous,” ante, at 420, that this language forbids purely private as well as state-authorized discrimination. With all respect, I do not find it so. For me, there is an inherent ambiguity in the *453term “right,” as used in § 1982. The “right” referred to may either be a right to equal status under the law, in which case the statute operates only against state-sanctioned discrimination, or it may be an “absolute” right enforceable against private individuals. To me, the words of the statute, taken alone, suggest the former interpretation, not the latter.9

Further, since intervening revisions have not been meant to alter substance, the intended meaning of § 1982 must be drawn from the words in which it was originally enacted. Section 1982 originally was a part of § 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27. Sections 1 and 2 of that Act provided in relevant part:

“That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power . . . are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens, of every race and color . . . , shall have the same right, in every State and Territory *454in the United States, ... to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property . . . as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.

“Sec. 2. That any person who, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, shall subject, or cause to be subjected, any inhabitant of any State or Territory to the deprivation of any right secured or protected by this act . . . shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor . . .

It seems to me that this original wording indicates even mor.e strongly than the present language that § 1 of the Act (as well as § 2, which is explicitly so limited) was intended to apply only to action taken pursuant to state or community authority, in the form of a “law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom.” 10 And with deference I suggest that the language of § 2, taken alone, no more implies that § 2 “was carefully drafted to exempt private violations of § 1 from the criminal sanctions it imposed,” see ante, at 425, than it does that § 2 was carefully drafted to enforce all of the rights secured by § 1.

C.

The Court rests its opinion chiefly upon the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. I shall endeavor to show that those debates do not, as the Court would have it, overwhelmingly support the result reached by the Court, and in fact that a contrary conclusion may equally well be drawn. I shall consider the legislative *455history largely in chronological sequence, dealing separately with the Senate and House debates.

The First Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress met on December 4, 1865, some six months after the preceding Congress had sent to the States the Thirteenth Amendment, and a few days before word was received of that Amendment’s ratification. On December 13, Senator Wilson introduced a bill which would have invalidated all laws in the former rebel States which discriminated among persons as to civil rights on- the basis of color, and which would have made it a misdemeanor to enact or enforce such a statute.11 On the same day, Senator Trumbull said with regard to Senator Wilson’s proposal:

“The bill does not go far enough, if what we have been told to-day in regard to the treatment of freedmen in the southern States is true. . . . [U]ntil [the Thirteenth Amendment] is adopted there may be some question ... as to the authority of Congress to pass such a bill as this, but after the adoption of the constitutional amendment there can be none.

“The second clause of that amendment was inserted for some purpose, and I would like to know ... for what purpose? Sir, for the purpose, and none other, of preventing State Legislatures from enslaving, under any pretense, those whom the first clause declared should be free.” 12

Senator Trumbull then indicated that he would introduce separate bills to enlarge the powers of the recently founded Freedmen’s Bureau and to secure the freedmen in their civil rights, both bills in his view being authorized by the second clause of the Thirteenth Amendment.13 *456Since he had just stated that the purpose of that clause was to enable Congress to nullify acts of the state legislatures, it seems inferable that this was also to be the aim of the promised bills.

On January 5, Senator Trumbull introduced both the Freedmen’s bill and the civil rights bill.14 The Freedmen’s bill would have strengthened greatly the existing system by which agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau exercised protective supervision over freedmen wherever they were present in large numbers. Inter alia, the Freedmen’s bill would have permitted the President, acting through the Bureau, to extend “military protection and jurisdiction” over all cases in which persons in the former rebel States were

“in consequence of any State or local law, ordinance, police or other regulation, custom, or prejudice, [denied or refused] any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right ... to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, ... on account of race . . . .”15

The next section of the Freedmen’s bill provided that the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau might try and convict of a misdemeanor any person who deprived another of such rights on account of race and “under color of any State or local law, ordinance, police, or other regulation or custom . . . .” Thus, the Freedmen’s bill, which was generally limited in its application to the Southern States and which was correspondingly more sweeping in its pro*457tection of the freedmen than the civil rights bill,16 defined both the rights secured and the denials of those rights which were criminally punishable in terms of acts done under the aegis of a State or locality. The only significant distinction was that denials which occurred “in consequence of a State or local . . . prejudice” would have entitled the victim to military protection but would not have been criminal. In the corresponding section of the companion and generally parallel civil rights bill, which was to be effective throughout the Nation, the reference to “prejudice” was omitted from the rights-defining section. This would seem to imply that the more widely applicable civil rights bill was meant to provide protection only against those discriminations which were legitimated by a state or community sanction sufficiently powerful to deserve the name “custom.”

The form of the Freedmen’s bill also undercuts the Court’s argument, ante, at 424, that if § 1 of the Civil Rights Act were construed as extending only to “state action,” then “much of § 2 [which clearly was so limited] would have made no sense at all.” For the similar structure of the companion Freedmen’s bill, drafted by the same hand and largely parallel in structure, would seem to confirm that the limitation to “state action” was deliberate.

The civil rights bill was debated intermittently in the Senate from January 12, 1866, until its eventual *458passage over the President’s veto on April 6. In the course of the debates, Senator Trumbull, who was by far the leading spokesman for the bill, made a number of statements which can only be taken to mean that the bill was aimed at “state action” alone. For example, on January 29, 1866, Senator Trumbull began by citing a number of recently enacted Southern laws depriving men of rights named in the bill. He stated that “[t]he purpose of the bill under consideration is to destroy all these discriminations, and carry into effect the constitutional • amendment.” 17 Later the same day, Senator Trumbull quoted § 2 of the bill in full, and said:

“This is the valuable section of the bill so far as protecting the rights of freedmen is concerned. . . . When it comes to be understood in all parts of the United States that any person who shall deprive another of any right ... in consequence of his color or race will expose himself to fine and imprisonment, I think such acts will soon cease.” 18

These words contain no hint that the “rights” protected by § 2 were intended to be any less broad than those secured by § 1. Of course, § 2 plainly extended only to “state action.” That Senator Trumbull viewed §§ 1 and 2 as co-extensive appears even more clearly from his answer the following day when asked by Senator Cowan whether there was “not a provision [in the bill] by which State officers are to be punished?” Senator Trumbull replied: “Not State officers especially, but everybody who violates the law. It is the intention to punish everybody who violates the law.” 19

*459On January 29, Senator Trumbull also uttered the first of several remarkably similar and wholly unambiguous statements which indicated that the bill was aimed only at “state action.” He said:

“[This bill] may be assailed as drawing to the Federal Government powers that properly belong to 'States'; but I apprehend, rightly considered, it is not obnoxious to that objection. It will have no operation in any State where the laws are equal, where all persons have the same civil rights without regard to color or race. It udll have no operation in the State ■of Kentucky when her slave code and all her laws discriminating between persons on account of race or color shall be abolished.” 20

Senator Trumbull several times reiterated this view. On February 2, replying to Senator Davis of Kentucky, he said:

“Why, sir, if the State of Kentucky makes no discrimination in civil rights between its citizens, this bill has no operation lohatever in the State of Kentucky. Are all the rights of the people of Kentucky gone because they cannot discriminate and punish one man for doing a thing that they do not punish another for doing? The bill draws to the Federal *460Government no power whatever if the States will perform their constitutional obligations.” 21

On April 4, after the President’s veto of the bill, Senator Trumbull stated that “If an offense is committed against a colored person simply because he is colored, in a State where the law affords him the same protection as if he were white, this act neither has nor was intended to have anything to do with his case, because he has adequate remedies in the State courts . . . .”22 Later the same day, he said:

“This bill in no manner interferes with the municipal regulations of any State which protects all alike in their rights of person and property. It could have no operation in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, or most of the States of the Union.” 23

The remarks just quoted constitute the plainest possible statement that the civil rights bill was intended to apply only to state-sanctioned conduct and not to purely private action. The Court has attempted to negate the force of these statements by citing other declarations by Senator Trumbull and others that the bill would operate everywhere in the country. See ante, at 426, n. 35. However, the obvious and natural way to reconcile these two sets of statements is to read the ones about the bill’s nationwide application as declarations that the enactment of a racially discriminatory law in any State would bring the bill into effect there.24 It seems to me that *461very great weight must be given these statements of Senator Trumbull, for they were clearly made to reassure Northern and Border State Senators about the extent of the bill’s operation in their States.

On April 4, Senator Trumbull gave two additional indications that the bill was intended to reach only state-sanctioned action. The first occurred during .Senator Trumbull’s defense of the part of § 3 of the bill which gave federal courts jurisdiction “of all causes, civil and criminal, affecting persons who are denied or cannot enforce in the courts ... of the State or locality where they may be any of the rights secured to them by the first section of this act . . . .” Senator Trumbull said:

“If it be necessary in order to protect the freedman in his rights that he should have authority to go into the Federal courts in all cases where a custom prevails in a State, or where there is a statute-law of the State discriminating against him, I think we have the authority to confer that jurisdiction under the second clause of the [Thirteenth Amendment].”25

If the bill had been intended to reach purely private discrimination it seems very strange that Senator Trumbull did not think it necessary to defend the surely more dubious federal jurisdiction over cases involving no state action whatsoever. A few minutes later, Senator Trumbull reiterated that his reason for introducing the civil rights bill was to bring about “the passage of a law by Congress, securing equality in civil rights when denied by State authorities to freedmen and all other inhabitants of the United States . . . .”26

Thus, the Senate debates contain many explicit statements by the bill’s own author, to whom the Senate natu*462rally looked for an explanation of its terms, indicating that the bill would prohibit only state-sanctioned discrimination.

The Court puts forward in support of its construction an impressive number of quotations from and citations to the Senate debates. However, upon more circumspect analysis than the Court has chosen to give, virtually all of these appear to be either irrelevant or equally consistent with a “state action” interpretation. The Court’s mention, ante, at 427, of a reference in the Senate debates to “white employers who refused to pay their Negro workers” surely does not militate against a “state action” construction, since “state action” would include conduct pursuant to “custom,” and there was a very strong “custom” of refusing to pay slaves for work done. The Court’s citation, ante, at 427-428, of Senate references to “white citizens who assaulted Negroes” is not in point, for the debate cited by the Court concerned the Freedmen’s bill, not the civil rights bill.27 The former by its terms forbade discrimination pursuant to “prejudice,” as well as “custom,” and in any event neither bill provided a remedy for the victim of a racially motivated assault.28

The Court’s quotation, ante, at 429-430, of Senator Trumbull’s December 13 reference to the then-embryonic civil rights bill is also compatible with a “state action” interpretation, at least when it is recalled that the unedited quotation, see supra, at 456, includes a statement that *463the second clause of the Thirteenth Amendment, the authority for the proposed bill, was intended solely as a check on state legislatures. Senator Trumbull’s declaration the following day that the forthcoming bill would be aimed at discrimination pursuant to “a prevailing public sentiment” as well as to legislation, see ante, at 431, is also consistent with a “state action” reading of the bill, for the bill explicitly prohibited actions done under color of “custom” as well as of formal laws.

The three additional statements of Senator Trumbull and the remarks of senatorial opponents of the bill, quoted by the Court, ante, at 431-433, to show the bill’s sweeping scope, are entirely ambiguous as to whether the speakers- thought the bill prohibited only state-sanctioned conduct or reached wholly private action as well. Indeed, if the bill’s opponents thought that it would have the latter effect, it seems a little surprising that they did not object more strenuously and explicitly.29 The remark of Senator Lane which is quoted by the Court, ante, at 433, to prove that he viewed the bill as reaching “ 'the white man . . . [who] would invoke the power of local prejudice’ against the Negro,” seems to have been quoted out of context. The quotation is taken from a part of Senator Lane’s speech in which he defended the section of the bill permitting the President to invoke military authority when necessary to enforce the bill. After noting that there might be occasions “[w]here organized resistance to the legal authority assumes that shape that the officers cannot execute a writ,”30 Senator Lane concluded that “if [the white man] would invoke the power of local prejudice to override the laws of the country, this is no Government unless the military may be called in to enforce the order of the *464civil courts and obedience to the laws of the country.” 31 It seems to me manifest that, taken in context, this remark is beside the point in this case.

The post-veto remarks of opponents of the bill, cited by the Court, ante, at 435, also are inconclusive. Once it is recognized that the word “right” as used in the bill is ambiguous, then Senator Cowan’s statement, ante, at 435, that the bill would confer “the right ... to purchase . . . real estate . . . without any qualification” 32 must inevitably share that ambiguity. The remarks of Senator Davis, ibid., with respect to rental of hotel rooms and sale of church pews are, when viewed in context, even less helpful to the Court’s thesis. For these comments were made immediately following Senator Davis’ plaintive acknowledgment that “this measure proscribes all discriminations . . . that may be made ... by any 'ordinance, regulation, or custom,’ as well as by 'law or statute.’ ”33 Senator Davis then observed that ordinances, regulations, and customs presently conferred upon white persons the most comfortable accommodations in ships and steamboats, hotels, churches, and railroad cars, and stated that “[t]his bill . . . declares all persons who enforce those distinctions to be criminals against the United States . . . .” 34 Thus, Senator Davis not only tied these obnoxious effects of the bill to its “customs” provision but alleged that they were brought about by § 2 as well as § 1. There is little wonder that his remarks “elicited no reply,” see ibid., from the bill’s supporters.

The House debates are even fuller of statements indicating that the civil rights bill was intended to reach only state-endorsed discrimination. Representative Wilson *465was the bill’s sponsor in the House. On the very first day of House debate, March 1, Representative Wilson said in explaining the bill:

“[I]f the States, seeing that we have citizens of different races and colors, would but shut their eyes to these differences and legislate, so far at least as regards civil rights and immunities, as though all citizens were of one race or color, our troubles as a nation would be well-nigh over. ... It will be observed that the entire structure oj this bill rests on the discrimination relative to civil rights and immunities made by the States on ‘account of race, color, or previous condition of slavery.’ ” 35

A few minutes later, Representative Wilson said:

“Before our Constitution was formed, the great fundamental rights [which are embodied in this bill] belonged to every person who became a member of our great national family. . . . The entire machinery of government . . . was designed, among other things, to secure a more perfect enjoyment of these rights. ... I assert that we possess the power to do those things which Governments are organized to do; that we may protect a citizen oj the United States against a violation oj his rights by the law oj a single State; . . . that this power permeates our whole system, is a part of it, without which the States can run riot over every fundamental right belonging to citizens of the United States . . . .”36

These statements surely imply that Representative Wilson believed the bill to be aimed at state-sanctioned discrimination and not at purely private discrimination, *466which of course existed unhindered “[b]efore our Constitution was formed.”

Other congressmen expressed similar views. On March 2, Representative Thayer, one of the bill’s supporters, said:

“The events of the last four years . . . have changed [the freedmen] from a condition of slavery to that of freedom. The practical question now to be decided is whether they shall be in fact freemen. It is whether they shall have the benefit of this great charter of liberty given to them by the American people.

“Sir, if it is competent for the new-formed Legislatures of the rebel States to enact laws . . . which declare, for example, that they shall not have the privilege of purchasing a home for themselves and their families; . . . then I demand to know, of what practical value is the amendment abolishing slavery . . . ?”37

A few minutes later, he said:

“Do you give freedom to a man when you allow him to be deprived of those great natural rights to which every man is entitled by nature? . .. [W]hat kind of freedom is that by which the man placed in a state of freedom is subject to the tyranny of laws which deprive him of [those] rights . . . ?”38

A little later, Representative Thayer added:

“[The freedmen] are entitled to the benefit of that guarantee of the Constitution which secures to every citizen the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and no just reason exists why they should not enjoy the protection of that guarantee ....

*467“What is the necessity which gives occasion for that protection? Sir, in at least six of the lately rebellious States the reconstructed Legislatures of those States have enacted laws which, if permitted to be enforced, would strike a fatal blow at the liberty of the freedmen . . . .”39

An opponent of the bill, Representative Bingham, said on March 9 :

“[W]hat, then, is proposed by the provision of the first section? Simply to strike down by congressional enactment every State constitution which makes a discrimination on account of race or color in any of the civil rights of the citizen.”40

Representative Shellabarger, a supporter of the bill, discussed it on the same day. He began by stating that he had no doubt of the constitutionality of § 2 of the bill, provided Congress might enact § 1. With respect to § 1, he said:

“Its whole effect is not to confer or regulate rights, but to require that whatever of these enumerated rights and obligations are imposed by State laws shall be for and upon all citizens alike .... Self-evidently this is the whole effect of this first section. It secures . . . equality of protection in those enumerated civil rights which the States may deem proper to confer upon any races. ... It must . . . be noted that the violations of citizens’ rights, which are reached and punished by this bill, are those which are inflicted under ‘color of law,’ &c. The bill does not reach mere private wrongs, but only those done under color of state authority . . . . [I]ts whole force is expended in defeating an attempt, under State laws, to deprive races and the *468members thereof as such of the rights enumerated in this act. This is the whole of it.” 41

Thus, Representative Shellabarger said in so many words that the bill had no impact on “mere private wrongs.”

After the President’s veto of the bill, Representative Lawrence, a supporter, stated his views. He said:

“The bill does not declare who shall or shall not have the right to sue, give evidence, inherit, purchase, and sell property.- These questions are left to the States to determine, subject only to the limitation that there are some inherent and inalienable rights pertaining to every citizen, which cannot be abolished or abridged by State constitutions or laws. . . .

“Now, there are two ways in which a State may undertake to deprive citizens of these . . . rights: either by prohibitory laws, or by a failure to protect any one of them.

“If the people of a State should become hostile to a large class of naturalized citizens and should enact laws to prohibit them and no other citizens . . . from inheriting, buying, holding, or selling property, . . . that would be prohibitory legislation. If the State should simply enact laws for native-born citizens and provide no law under which naturalized citizens could enjoy any one of these rights, and should deny them all protection by civil process or penal enactments, that would be a denial of justice.” 42

*469From this passage it would appear that Representative Lawrence conceived of the word “right” in § 1 of the bill as referring to a right to equal legal status, and that he believed that the sole effect of the bill was to prohibit state-imposed discrimination.

The Court quotes and cites a number of passages from the House debates in aid of its construction of the bill. As in the case of the Senate debates, most of these appear upon close examination to provide little support. The first significant citation, ante, at 425, n. 33, is a dialogue between Representative Wilson and Representative Loan, another of the bill’s supporters-The full exchange went as follows:

“Mr. LOAN. Mr. Speaker, I . . . ask the chairman . . . why the committee limit the provisions of the second section to those who act under the color of law. Why not let them apply to the whole community where the acts are committed?

“Mr. WILSON, of Iowa. That grows out of the fact that there is discrimination in reference to civil rights under the local laws of the States. Therefore we provide that the persons who under the color of these local laws should do these things shall be liable to this punishment.

“Mr. LOAN. What penalty is imposed upon others than officers who inflict these wrongs on the citizen?

“Mr. WILSON, of Iowa. We are not making a general criminal code for the States.

“Mr. LOAN. Why not abrogate those laws instead of inflicting penalties upon officers who execute writs under them?

“Mr. WILSON, of Iowa. A law without a sanction is of very little force.

“Mr. LOAN. Then why not put it in the bill directly?

*470“Mr. WILSON, of Iowa. That is what we are trying to do.” 43

The interpretation which the Court places on Representative Wilson’s remarks, see ante, at 425, n. 33, is a conceivable one.44 However, it is equally likely that, since both participants in the dialogue professed concern solely with § 2 of the bill, their remarks carried no implication about the scope of § 1. Moreover, it is possible to read the entire exchange as concerned with discrimination in communities having discriminatory laws, with Representative Loan urging that the laws should be abrogated directly or that all persons, not merely officers, who discriminated pursuant to them should be criminally punishable.

The next significant reliance upon the House debates is the Court’s mention of references in the debates “to white employers who refused to pay their Negro workers, white planters who agreed among themselves not to hire freed slaves without the permission of their former masters, white citizens who assaulted Negroes or who combined to drive them out of their communities.” Ante, at 427-428.45 (Footnotes omitted.) As was pointed out in the discussion of the Senate debates, supra, at 462, the references to white men’s refusals to pay freedmen *471and their agreements not to hire freedmen without their “masters’ ” consent are by no means contrary to a “state action” view of the civil rights bill, since the bill expressly forbade action pursuant to “custom” and both of these practices reflected “customs” from the time of slavery. The Court cites two different House references to assaults on Negroes by whites. The first was by Congressman Windom,46 and close examination reveals that his only mention of assaults was with regard to a Texas “pass system,” under which freedmen were whipped if found abroad without passes, and a South Carolina law permitting freedmen to be whipped for insolence.47 Since these assaults were sanctioned by law, or at least by “custom,” they would be reached by the bill even under a “state action” interpretation. The other allusion to assaults, as well as the mention of combinations of whites to drive freedmen from communities, occurred in a speech by Representative Lawrence.48 These references were shortly preceded by the remarks of Congressman Lawrence quoted, supra, at 468, and were immediately followed by his comment that “If States should undertake to authorize such offenses, or deny to a class of citizens all protection against them, we may then inquire whether the nation itself may be destroyed . . . .”49 These fore and aft remarks imply that Congressman Lawrence’s concern was that the activities referred to would receive state sanction.

The. Court, ante, at 428, n. 40, quotes a statement of Representative Eldridge, an opponent of the bill, in which he mentioned references by the bill’s supporters to “individual cases of wrong perpetrated upon *472the freedmen of the South ...”50 However, up to that time there had been no mention whatever in the House debates of any purely private discrimination,51 so one can only conclude that by “individual cases” Representative Eldridge meant “isolated cases,” not “cases of purely private discrimination.”

The last significant reference52 by the Court to the House debates is its statement, ante, at 434, that “Representative Cook of Illinois thought that, without appropriate federal legislation, any 'combination of men in [a] neighborhood [could] prevent [a Negro] from having any chance’ to enjoy” the benefits of the Thirteenth Amendment. This quotation seems to be taken out of context. What Representative Cook said was:

“[W]hen those rights which are enumerated in this bill are denied to any class of men on account of race or color, when they are subject to a system of vagrant laws which sells them into slavery or involuntary servitude, which operates upon them as upon no other part of the community, they are not secured in the rights of freedom. If a man can be sold, the man is a slave. If he is nominally freed by the amendment to the Constitution, ... he has simply the labor of his hands on which he can depend. Any combination of men in his neighborhood can prevent him from having any chance to support himself by his labor. They can pass a law that a man not supporting himself by labor shall *473be deemed a vagrant, and that a vagrant shall be sold.” 53

These remarks clearly were addressed to discrimina-tions effectuated by law, or sanctioned by “custom.” As such, they would have been reached by the bill even under a “state action” interpretation.

D.

The foregoing analysis of the language, structure, and legislative history of the 1866 Civil Rights Act shows, I believe, that the Court’s thesis that the Act was meant to extend to purely private action is open to the most serious doubt, if indeed it does not render that thesis wholly untenable. Another, albeit less tangible, consideration points in the same direction. Many of the legislators who took part in the congressional debates inevitably must have shared the individualistic ethic of their time, which emphasized personal freedom54 and embodied a distaste for governmental interference which was soon to culminate in the era of laissez-faire.55 It seems to me that most of these men would have regarded *474it as a great intrusion on individual liberty for the Government to take from a man the power to refuse for personal reasons to enter into a purely private transaction involving the disposition of property, albeit those personal reasons might reflect racial bias. It should be remembered that racial prejudice was not uncommon in 1866, even outside the South.56 Although Massachusetts had recently enacted the Nation’s first law prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations,57 Negroes could not ride within Philadelphia streetcars58 or attend public schools with white children in New York City.59 Only five States accorded equal voting rights to Negroes,60 and it appears that Negroes were allowed to serve on juries only in Massachusetts.61 Residential segregation was the prevailing pattern almost every*475where in the North.62 There were no state “fair housing” laws in 1866, and it appears that none had ever been proposed.63 In this historical context, I cannot conceive that a bill thought to prohibit purely private discrimination not only.in the sale or rental of housing but in all property transactions would not have received a great deal of criticism explicitly directed to this feature. The fact that the 1866 Act received no criticism of this kind64 is for me strong additional evidence that it was not regarded as extending so far.

In sum, the most which can be said with assurance about the intended impact of the 1866 Civil Rights Act upon purely private discrimination is that the Act probably was envisioned by most members of Congress as prohibiting official, community-sanctioned discrimination in the South, engaged in pursuant to local “customs” which in the recent time of slavery probably were embodied in laws or regulations.65 Acts done under the *476color of such “customs” were, of course, said by the Court in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, to constitute “state action” prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment. See id., at 16, 17, 21. Adoption of a “state action” construction of the Civil Rights Act would therefore have the additional merit of bringing its interpretation into line with that of the Fourteenth Amendment, which this Court has consistently held to reach only “state action.” This seems especially desirable in light of the wide agreement that a major purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, at least in the minds of its congressional proponents, was to assure that the rights conferred by the then recently enacted Civil Rights Act could not be taken away by a subsequent Congress.66

II.

The foregoing, I think, amply demonstrates that the Court has chosen to resolve this ease by according to a loosely worded statute a meaning which is open to the strongest challenge in light of the statute’s legislative history. In holding that the Thirteenth Amendment is sufficient constitutional authority for § 1982 as interpreted, the Court also decides a question of great importance. Even contemporary supporters of the aims of the 1866 Civil Rights Act doubted that those goals could constitutionally be achieved under the Thirteenth Amendment,67 and this Court has twice expressed similar *477doubts. See Hodges v. United States, 203 U. S. 1, 16-18; Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U. S. 323, 330. But cf. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 22. Thus, it is plain that the course of decision followed by the Court today entails the resolution of important and difficult issues.

The only apparent way of deciding this case without reaching those issues would be to hold that the petitioners are entitled to relief on the alternative ground advanced by them: that the respondents’ conduct amounted to “state action” forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment. However, that route is not without formidable obstacles of its own, for the opinion of the Court of Appeals makes it clear that this case differs substantially from any “state action” case previously decided by this Court. See 379 F. 2d, at 40-45.

The fact that a case is “hard” does not, of course, relieve a judge of his duty to decide it. Since, the Court did vote to hear this case, I normally would consider myself obligated to decide whether the petitioners are entitled to relief on either of the grounds on which they rely. After mature reflection, however, I have concluded that this is one of those rare instances in which an event which occurs after the hearing of argument so diminishes a case’s public significance, when viewed in light of the difficulty of the questions presented, as to justify this Court in dismissing the writ as improvidently granted.

The occurrence to which I refer is the recent enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Pub. L. 90-284, 82 Stat. 73. Title VIII of that Act contains comprehensive “fair housing” provisions, which by the terms of § 803 will become applicable on January 1, 1969, to persons who, like the petitioners, attempt to buy houses from developers. Under those provisions, such persons will be entitled to injunctive relief and damages from developers *478who refuse to sell to them on account of race or color, unless the parties are able to resolve their dispute by other means. Thus, the type of relief which the petitioners seek will be available within seven months’ time under the terms of a presumptively constitutional Act of Congress.68 In these circumstances, it seems obvious that the case has lost most of its public importance, and I believe that it would be much the wiser course for this Court to refrain from deciding it. I think it particularly unfortunate for the Court to persist in deciding this case on the basis of a highly questionable interpretation of a sweeping, century-old statute which, as the Court acknowledges, see ante, at 415, contains none of the exemptions which the Congress of our own time found it necessary to include in a statute regulating relationships so personal in nature. In effect, this Court, by its construction of § 1982, has extended the coverage of federal “fair housing” laws far beyond that which Congress in its wisdom chose to provide in the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The political process now having taken hold again in this very field, I am at a loss to understand why the Court should have deemed it appropriate or, in the circumstances of this case, necessary to proceed with such precipitate and insecure strides.

I am not dissuaded from my view by the circumstance that the 1968 Act was enacted after oral argument in this case, at a time when the parties and amici curiae had invested time and money in anticipation of a decision on the merits, or by the fact that the 1968 Act apparently will not entitle these petitioners to the relief which they seek.69 For the certiorari jurisdiction was not *479conferred upon this Court “merely to give the defeated party in the . . . Court of Appeals another hearing,” Magnum Co. v. Coty, 262 U. S. 159, 163, or “for the benefit of the particular litigants,” Rice v. Sioux City Cemetery, 349 U. S. 70, 74, but to decide issues, “the settlement of which is of importance to the public as distinguished from . . . the parties,” Layne & Bowler Corp. v. Western Well Works, Inc., 261 U. S. 387, 393. I deem it far more important that this Court should avoid, if possible, the decision of constitutional and unusually difficult statutory questions than that we fulfill the expectations of every litigant who appears before us.

One prior decision of this Court especially suggests dismissal of the writ as the proper course in these unusual circumstances. In Rice v. Sioux City Cemetery, supra, the issue was whether a privately owned cemetery might defend a suit for breach of a contract to bury on the ground that the decedent was a Winnebago Indian and the contract restricted burial privileges to Caucasians. In considering a petition for rehearing following an initial affirmance by an equally divided Court, there came to the Court’s attention for the first time an Iowa statute which prohibited cemeteries from discriminating on account of race, but which would not have benefited the Rice petitioner because of an exception for “pending litigation.” Mr. Justice Frankfurter, speaking for a majority of the Court, held that the writ should be dismissed. He pointed out that the case presented “evident difficulties,” 349 U. S., at 77, and noted that “[h]ad the statute been properly brought to our attention . . . , the case would have assumed such an isolated significance that it would hardly have been brought here in the first instance.” Id., at 76-77. This case certainly presents difficulties as substantial as those in Rice. Compare what has been said in this opinion with 349 U. S., *480at 72-73; see also Bell v. Maryland, 378 U. S. 226. And if the petition for a writ of certiorari in this case had been filed a few months after, rather than a few months before, the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, I venture to say that the case would have been deemed to possess such “isolated significance,” in comparison with its difficulties, that the petition would not have been granted.

For these reasons, I would dismiss the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted.

1

This “state action” argument emphasizes the respondents’ role as housing developers exercising continuing authority over a suburban housing complex with about 1,000 inhabitants.

2

The Civil Rights Act of 1968, Pub, L. 90-284, 82 Stat. 73.

3

Id., §§801-819.

4

See ante, at 417, n. 21.

5

See also Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 317-318.

6

Section 1978 of the Revised Statutes.

7

See also Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U. S. 60, 78-79.

8

It seems to me that this passage is not dictum, as the Court terms it, ante, at 419 and n. 25, but a holding. For if the Court had held the covenants in question invalid as between the parties, then it would not have had to rely upon a finding of “state action.”

9

Despite the Court’s view that this reading flies in the face of the “plain and unambiguous terms” of the statute, see ante, at 420, it is not without precedent. In the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, the Court said of identical language in the predecessor statute to § 1982:

“[C]ivil rights, such as are guaranteed by the Constitution against State aggression, cannot be impaired by the wrongful acts of individuals, unsupported by State authority .... The wrongful act of an individual, unsupported by any such authority, is simply a private wrong, or a crime of that individual; an invasion of the rights of the injured party, it is true . . . ; but if not sanctioned in some way by the State, or not done under State authority, his rights remain in full force, and may presumably be vindicated by resort to the laws of the State for redress. An individual cannot deprive a man of his right ... to hold property, to buy and sell. . . ; he may, by force or fraud, interfere with the enjoyment of the right in a particular case; . . . but, unless protected in these wrongful acts by some shield of State law or State authority, he cannot destroy or injure the right . . . .” 109 U. S., at 17.

10

The Court does not claim that the deletion from § 1 of the statute, in 1874, of the words “any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding” was intended to have any substantive effect. See ante, at 422, n. 29.

11

See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 39-42.

12

Id., at 43.

13

See ibid.

14

See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 129.

15

Freedmen’s bill, § 7. The text of the bill may be found in E. McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction 72 (1871). The Freedmen’s bill was passed by both the Senate and the House, but the Senate failed to override the President’s veto. See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 421, 688, 742, 748,775, 915-916, 943.

16

Section 7 of the Freedmen’s bill would have permitted the President to extend “military protection and jurisdiction” over all cases in which the specified rights were denied, while § 3 of the Civil Rights Act merely gave the federal courts concurrent jurisdiction over such actions. Section 8 of the Freedmen’s bill would have allowed agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau to try and convict those who violated the bill’s criminal provisions, while § 3 of the Civil Rights Act only gave the federal courts exclusive jurisdiction over such actions.

17

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 474. (Emphasis added.)

18

Id., at 475. (Emphasis added.)

19

Id., at 500. (Emphasis added.) The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, suggest how Senator Trumbull might have expected § 2 to *459affect persons other than “officers” in spite of its “under color” language, for it was there said in dictum that:

“The Civil Rights Bill ... is analogous ... to [a law] under the original Constitution, declaring that the validity of contracts should not be impaired, and that if any person bound by a contract should refuse to comply with it, under color or pretence that it had been rendered void or invalid by a State law, he should be liable to an action upon it in the courts of the United States, with the addition of a penalty for setting up such an unjust and unconstitutional defence.” 109 U. S., at 17. (Emphasis added.)

20

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 476. (Emphasis added.)

21

Id., at 600. (Emphasis added.)

22

Id., at 1758.

23

Id., at 1761. (Emphasis added.)

24

Moreover, a few Northern States apparently did have laws which denied to Negroes rights enumerated in the Act. See G. Stephenson, Race Distinctions in American Law 36-39 (1910); L. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860, at 93-94 (1961).

25

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1759.

26

Id., at 1760. (Emphasis added.)

27

See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 339-340.

28

The Court also gives prominence, see ante, at 428429, to a report by General Carl Schurz which described private as well as official discrimination against freedmen in the South. However, it is apparent that the Senate regarded the report merely as background, and it figured relatively little in the debates. Moreover, to the extent that the described discrimination was the product of “custom,” it would have been prohibited by the bill.

29

See infra, at 473-475.

30

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 603.

31

Ibid.

32

See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1781.

33

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., Appendix, 183.

34

Ibid.

35

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1118. (Emphasis added.)

36

Id., at 1119. (Emphasis added.)

37

Id., at 1151. (Emphasis added.)

38

Id., at 1152. (Emphasis added.)

39

Id., at 1153. (Emphasis added.)

40

Id., at 1291. (Emphasis added.)

41

Id., at 1293-1294. It is quite clear that Representative Shella-barger was speaking of the bill’s first section, for he did not mention the second section until later in his speech, and then only briefly and in terms which indicated that he thought it co-extensive with the first (“I cannot remark on the second section further than to say that it is the ordinary case of providing punishment for violating a law of Congress.”). See id., at 1294.

42

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1832-1833. (Emphasis added.)

43

Id., at 1120.

44

It is worthy of note, however, that if Representative Wilson believed that § 2 of the bill would apply only to state officers, and not to other members of the community, he apparently differed from the bill’s author. See the remarks of Senator Trumbull quoted, supra, at 458.

45

The Court’s reliance, see ante, at 425, n. 33, on the statement of Representative Shellabarger that “the violations of citizens’ rights, which are reached and punished by this bill, are those which are . . . done under color of state authority Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1294, seems very misplaced when the statement is taken in context. A fuller version of Representative Shellabarger’s remarks will be found, supra, at 467-468.

46

See Cong. Globe, 39th. Cong., 1st Sess., 1160.

47

See ibid.

48

See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1835.

49

Ibid. (Emphasis added.)

50

Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 1156.

51

See id., at 1115-1124, 1151-1155.

52

The emphasis given by the Court to the statement of Representative Thayer which is quoted, ante, at 433H134, surely evaporates when the statement is viewed in conjunction with Representative Thayer’s immediately following remarks, quoted, supra, at 466-467.

53

Id., at 1124. (Emphasis added.) Earlier in the same speech, Representative Cook had described actual vagrancy laws which had recently been passed by reconstructed Southern legislatures. See id., at 1123-1124.

54

An eminent American historian has said that the events of the last third of the 19th century took place “in a framework of pioneer individualistic mores . . . .” S. Morison, The Oxford History of the American People 788 (1965). See also 3 Y. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought 7-22 (1930).

55

It has been suggested that the effort of the congressional radicals to enact a program of land reform in favor of the freedmen during Reconstruction failed in part because it smacked too much of “paternalism” and interference with property rights. See K. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction 126-131 (1965).

56

See generally M. Konvitz & T. Leskes, A Century of Civil Rights (1961); L. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (1961); K. Stampp, supra, at 12-17; G. Stephenson, Race Distinctions in American Law (1910); Maslow & Robison, Civil Rights Legislation and the Fight for Equality, 1862-1952, 20 U. Chi. L. Rev. 363 (1953).

57

See M. Konvitz & T. Leskes, supra, at 155-156; 1864-1865 Mass. Acts and Resolves 650.

58

Negroes were permitted to ride only on the front platforms of the cars. See L. Litwack, supra, at 112.

59

Negro students in New York City were compelled to attend separate schools, called African schools, under authority of an 1864 New York State statute which empowered school officials to establish separate, equal schools for Negro children. See L. Litwack, supra, at 121, 133-134, 136, 151; G. Stephenson, supra, at 185; 1864 N. Y. Laws 1281. In 1883, the New York Court of Appeals held that students in Brooklyn might constitutionally be segregated pursuant to the statute. See People ex rel. King v. Gallagher, 93 N. Y. 438. In 1900, the statute was finally repealed and segregation legally forbidden. See 1900 N. Y. Laws, Vol. II, at 1173.

60

See L. Litwack, supra, at 91-92. The States were Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. See id., at 91.

61

See L. Litwack, supra, at 94.

62

See id., at 168-170.

63

It has been noted that:

“Residential housing, despite its importance . . . , appears to be the last of the major areas of discrimination that the states have been willing to attack.” M. Konvitz & T. Leskes, supra, at 236.

And as recently as 1953, it could be said:

“Bills have been introduced in state legislatures to forbid racial or religious discrimination in 'multiple dwellings’ (those housing three or more families), . . . but these proposals have not been considered seriously by any legislative body.” Maslow & Robison, supra, at 408. (Footnotes omitted.)

64

In contrast, the bill was repeatedly and vehemently attacked, in the face of emphatic denials by its sponsors, on the ground that it allegedly would invalidate two types of state laws: those denying Negroes equal voting rights and those prohibiting intermarriage. See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 598, 600, 604, 606, 1121, 1157, 1263.

65

The petitioners do not argue, and the Court does not suggest, that the discrimination complained of in this case was the product of such a “custom.”

66

See, e. g., H. Flack, The Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment 94 (1908); J. James, The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment 126-128, 179 (1956); 2 S. Morison & H. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic 39 (4th ed. 1950); K. Stampp, supra, at 136; J. tenBroek, Equal Under Law 224 (1965); L. Warsoff, Equality and the Law 126 (1938).

67

See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 504-505 (Senator Johnson); id., at 1291-1293 (Representative Bingham).

68

Of course, the question of the constitutionality of the “fair housing” provisions of the 1968 Civil Rights Act is not before us, and I intend no implication about how I would decide that issue.

69

See ante, at 417, n. 21.

UNITED STATES v. MORRISON et al.

No. 99-5.

Argued January 11, 2000

Decided May 15, 2000*

*600Rehnquist, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which O’Con-nor, ScaXjIA, Kennedy, and Thomas, JJ., joined. Thomas, J, filed a concurring opinion, post, p. 627. Souter, J, filed a dissenting opinion, in which Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ, joined, post, p. 628. Breyer, J, filed a dissenting opinion, in which Stevens, J, joined, and in which Souter and Ginsburg, JJ, joined as to Part I-A, post, p. 655.

Solicitor General Waxman argued the cause for the United States in No. 99-5. With him on the briefs were Acting Assistant Attorney General Ogden, Deputy Solicitor General Underwood, Barbara McDowell, Mark B. Stern, Alisa B. Klein, and Anne Murphy. Julie Goldsheid argued the cause for petitioner in No. 99-29. With her on the briefs were Martha F. Davis, Eileen N. Wagner, Carter G. Phillips, Richard D. Bernstein, Katherine L. Adams, Jacqueline Ger-son Cooper, and Paul A. Hemmersbaugh.

Michael E. Rosman argued the cause for respondents in both cases. With him on the brief for respondent Morrison were Hans F. Bader and W. David Paxton. Joseph Graham Painter, Jr., filed a brief for respondent Crawford.†

*

Together with No. 99-29, Brzonkala v. Morrison et al., also on certio-rari to the same court.

†

Briefs of amici curiae urging reversal were filed for the State of Arizona et al. by Janet Napolitano, Attorney General of Arizona, Eliot Spitzer, Attorney General of New York, Preeta D. Bansal, Solicitor General, Jennifer K. Brown, Assistant Attorney General, and Paula S. Bick-ett, and by the Attorneys General for their respective jurisdictions as fol*601lows: Bruce M. Botelho of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Bill Lockyer of California, Ken Salazar of Colorado, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, M. Jane Brady of Delaware, Thurbert E. Baker of Georgia, Earl I. Anzai of Hawaii, James E. Ryan of Illinois, Thomas J. Miller of Iowa, Carla J. Stovall of Kansas, Albert Benjamin “Ben” Chandler III of Kentucky, Richard P. Ieyoub of Louisiana, Andrew Ketterer of Maine, J Joseph Curran, Jr., of Maryland, Thomas F. Reilly of Massachusetts, Mike Hatch of Minnesota, Mike Moore of Mississippi, Jeremiah W. (Jay) Nixon of Missouri, Joseph P. Mazurek of Montana, Frankie Sue Del Papa of Nevada, Philip T. McLaughlin of New Hampshire, Patricia A, Madrid of New Mexico, Michael F. Easley of North Carolina, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, W. A. Drew Edmondson of Oklahoma, Hardy Myers of Oregon, Jose A. Fuentes Agostini of Puerto Rico, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Paul G. Summers of Tennessee, Jan Graham of Utah, William H. Sorrell of Vermont, Christine O. Gregoire of Washington, Darrell V. McGraw, Jr., of West Virginia, and James E. Doyle of Wisconsin; for the Association of Trial Lawyers of America by Jeffrey Robert White; for AYUDA, Inc., et al. by Laura A. Foggan and Clifford M. Sloan; for the Bar of the City of New York by Leon Friedman, Ronald J. Tabak, Louis A Craco, Jr., Greg Harris, and James F. Parver; for Equal Rights Advocates et al. by David S. Ettinger, Lisa R. Jaskol, and Mary-Christine Sungaila; for International Law Scholars and Human Rights Experts by Peter Weiss and Rhonda Copelon; for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law et al. by Norman Redlich, Mare D. Stern, Daniel F. Kolb, Barbara Arnwine, Thomas J. Henderson, Jeffrey Sinensky, Steven Freeman, Melvin Shralow, Eliot Mincberg, and Nadine Taub; for Law Professors by Bruce Ackerman, Vicki C. Jackson, and Judith Resnik; for the National Network to End Domestic Violence et al. by Bruce D. Sokler; and for Joseph R. Biden, Jr., pro se.

Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance were filed for the State of Alabama by Bill Pryor, Attorney General, John J. Park, Jr., Assistant Attorney General, and Jeffrey S. Sutton; for the Institute for Justice et al. by Richard A Epstein, William H. Mellor, Clint Bolick, Scott G. Bullock, Timothy Lynch, and Robert A Levy; for the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence by Edwin Meese III; for the Clarendon Foundation by Jay S. By bee and Ronald D. Maines; for the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund by Erik S. Jaffe and Phyllis Schlafiy; for the Independent Women’s Forum by Anita K. Blair, E. Duncan *602Getchell, Jr., J. William Boland, and Robert L. Hodges; for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers by Theodore M. Cooperstein and Lisa Kemler; for the Pacific Legal Foundation by Anne M. Hayes and M. Reed Hopper; for the Women’s Freedom Network by Robert L. King; and for Rita Gluzman by Alan E. Untereiner.

Michael P. Farris filed a brief for the Center for the Original Intent of the Constitution as amicus curiae.

*601Chief Justice Rehnquist

delivered the opinion of the Court.

In these cases we consider the constitutionality of 42 U. S. C. § 13981, which provides a federal civil remedy for the *602victims of gender-motivated violence. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, struck down §13981 because it concluded that Congress lacked constitutional authority to enact the section’s civil remedy. Believing that these cases are controlled by our decisions in United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549 (1995), United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629 (1883), and the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3 (1888), we affirm.

h — 1

Petitioner Christy Brzonkala enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in the fall of 1994. In September of that year, Brzonkala met respondents Antonio Morrison and James Crawford, who were both students at Virginia Tech and members of its varsity football team. Brzonkala alleges that, within 30 minutes of meeting Morrison and Crawford, they assaulted and repeatedly raped her. After the attack, Morrison allegedly told Brzonkala, “You better not have any . . . diseases.” Complaint ¶ 22. In the months following the rape, Morrison also allegedly announced in the dormitory’s dining room that he “like[d] to get girls drunk and ...,” Id., ¶ 31. The omitted portions, quoted verbatim in the briefs on file with this Court, consist of boasting, debased remarks about what Morrison would do to women, vulgar remarks that cannot fail to shock and offend.

Brzonkala alleges that this attack caused her to become severely emotionally disturbed and depressed. She sought assistance from a university psychiatrist, who prescribed *603antidepressant medication. Shortly after the rape Brzon-kala stopped attending classes and withdrew from the university.

In early 1995, Brzonkala filed a complaint against respondents under Virginia Tech’s Sexual Assault Policy. During the school-conducted hearing on her complaint, Morrison admitted having sexual contact with her despite the fact that she had twice told him “no.” After the hearing, Virginia Tech’s Judicial Committee found insufficient evidence to punish Crawford, but found Morrison guilty of sexual assault and sentenced him to immediate suspension for two semesters.

Virginia Tech’s dean of students upheld the judicial committee’s sentence. However, in July 1995, Virginia Tech informed Brzonkala that Morrison intended to initiate a eourt challenge to his conviction under the Sexual Assault Policy. University officials told her that a second hearing would be necessary to remedy the school’s error in prosecuting her complaint under that policy, which had not been widely circulated to students. The university therefore conducted a second hearing under its Abusive Conduct Policy, which was in force prior to the dissemination of the Sexual Assault Policy. Following this second hearing the Judicial Committee again found Morrison guilty and sentenced him to an identical 2-semester suspension. This time, however, the description of Morrison’s offense was, without explanation, changed from “sexual assault” to “using abusive language.”

Morrison appealed his second conviction through the university’s administrative system. On August 21, 1995, Virginia Tech’s senior vice president and provost set aside Morrison’s punishment. She concluded that it was “‘excessive when compared with other cases where there has been a finding of violation of the Abusive Conduct Policy,’ ” Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ., 132 F. 3d 950, 955 (CA4 1997). Virginia Teeh did not inform Brzonkala of this decision. After learning from a *604newspaper that Morrison would be returning to Virginia Tech for the fall 1995 semester, she dropped out of the university.

In December 1995, Brzonkala sued Morrison, Crawford, and Virginia Tech in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia. Her complaint alleged that Morrison’s and Crawford’s attack violated § 13981 and that Virginia Tech’s handling of her complaint violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 86 Stat. 373-375, 20 U. S. C. §§ 1681-1688. Morrison and Crawford moved to dismiss this complaint on the grounds that it failed to state a claim and that §13981’s civil remedy is unconstitutional. The United States, petitioner in No. 99-5, intervened to defend § 13981’s constitutionality.

The District Court dismissed Brzonkala’s Title IX claims against Virginia Tech for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. See Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic and State Univ., 935 F. Supp. 772 (WD Va. 1996). It then held that Brzonkala’s complaint stated a claim against Morrison and Crawford under §13981, but dismissed the complaint because it concluded that Congress lacked authority to enact the section under either the Commerce Clause or § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic and State Univ., 935 F. Supp. 779 (WD Va. 1996).

A divided panel of the Court of Appeals reversed the District Court, reinstating Brzonkala’s §13981 claim and her Title IX hostile environment claim.1 Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic and State Univ., 132 F. 3d 949 (CA4 1997). The foil Court of Appeals vacated the panel’s opinion and reheard the case en bane. The en banc court then issued an opinion affirming the District Court’s conclusion that Brzonkala stated a claim under §13981 because her complaint alleged a crime of violence and the allegations of Morrison’s crude and derogatory statements regarding his *605treatment of women sufficiently indicated that his crime was motivated by gender animus.2 Nevertheless, the court by a divided vote affirmed the District Court’s conclusion that Congress lacked constitutional authority to enact §13981’s civil remedy. Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic and State Univ., 169 F. 3d 820 (CA4 1999). Because the Court of Appeals invalidated a federal statute on constitutional grounds, we granted certiorari, 527 U. S. 1068 (1999).

Section 13981 was part of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, § 40302,108 Stat. 1941-1942. It states that “[a]U persons within the United States shall have the right to be free from crimes of violence motivated by gender.” 42 U. S. C. § 13981(b). To enforce that right, subsection (c) declares:

“A person (including a person who acts under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of any State) who commits a crime of violence motivated by gender and thus deprives another of the right declared in subsection (b) of this section shall be liable to the party injured, in an action for the recovery of compensatory and punitive damages, injunctive and declaratory relief, and such other relief as a court may deem appropriate.”

Section 13981 defines a “erim[e] of violence motivated by gender” as “a crime of violence committed because of gender or on the basis of gender, and due, at least in part, to an *606animus based on the victim’s gender.” § 13981(d)(1). It also provides that the term “crime of violence” includes any

“(A) ... act or series of acts that would constitute a felony against the person or that would constitute a felony against property if the conduct presents a serious risk of physical injury to another, and that would come within the meaning of State or Federal offenses described in section 16 of Title 18, whether or not those acts have actually resulted in criminal charges, prosecution, or conviction and whether or not those acts were committed in the special maritime, territorial, or prison jurisdiction of the United States; and “(B) includes an act or series of acts that would constitute a felony described in subparagraph (A) but for the relationship between the person who takes such action and the individual against whom such action is taken.” § 13981(d)(2).

Further clarifying the broad scope of § 13981’s civil remedy, subsection (e)(2) states that “[njothing in this section requires a prior criminal complaint, prosecution, or conviction to establish the elements of a cause of action under subsection (c) of this section.” And subsection (e)(3) provides a § 13981 litigant with a choice of forums: Federal and state courts “shall have concurrent jurisdiction” over complaints brought under the section.

Although the foregoing language of § 13981 covers a wide swath of criminal conduct, Congress placed some limitations on the section’s federal civil remedy. Subsection (e)(1) states that “[njothing in this section entitles a person to a cause of action under subsection (c) of this section for random acts of violence unrelated to gender or for acts that cannot be demonstrated, by a preponderance of the evidence, to be motivated by gender.” Subsection (e)(4) further states that § 13981 shall not be construed “to confer on the courts of the United States jurisdiction over any State law claim seeking *607the establishment of a divorce, alimony, equitable distribution of marital property, or child custody decree.”

Every law enacted by Congress must be based on one or more of its powers enumerated in the Constitution. “The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 176 (1803) (Marshall, C. J.). Congress explicitly identified the sources of federal authority on which it relied in enacting § 13981. It said that a “Federal civil rights cause of action” is established “[pursuant to the affirmative power of Congress . .. under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, as well as under section 8 of Article I of the Constitution.” 42 U. S. C. § 13981(a). We address Congress’ authority to enact this remedy under each of these constitutional provisions in turn.

II

Due respect for the decisions of a coordinate branch of Government demands that we invalidate a congressional enactment only upon a plain showing that Congress has exceeded its constitutional bounds. See United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S., at 568, 577-578 (Kennedy, J., concurring); United States v. Harris, 106 U. S., at 685. With this presumption of constitutionality in mind, we turn to the question whether §13981 falls within Congress’ power under Article I, § 8, of the Constitution. Brzonkala and the United States rely upon the third clause of the section, which gives Congress power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”

As we discussed at length in Lopez, our interpretation of the Commerce Clause has changed as our Nation has developed. See 514 U. S., at 552-557; id., at 568-574 (Kennedy, J., concurring); id., at 584, 598-599 (Thomas, J., concurring). We need not repeat that detailed review of *608the Commerce Clause’s history here; it suffices to say that, in the years since NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U. S. 1 (1937), Congress has had considerably greater latitude in regulating conduct and transactions under the Commerce Clause than our previous ease law permitted. See Lopez, 514 U. S., at 555-556; id., at 573-574 (Kennedy, J., concurring).

Lopez emphasized, however, that even under our modern, expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause, Congress’ regulatory authority is not without effective bounds. Id., at 557.

“[Ejven [our] modern-era precedents which have expanded congressional power under the Commerce Clause confirm that this power is subject to outer limits. In Jones & Laughlin Steel, the Court warned that the scope of the interstate commerce power ‘must be considered in the light of our dual system of government and may not be extended so as to embrace effects upon interstate commerce so indirect and remote that to embrace them, in view of our complex society, would effectually obliterate the distinction between what is national and what is local and create a completely centralized government.’” Id., at 556-557 (quoting Jones & Laughlin Steel, supra, at 37).3

As we observed in Lopez, modern Commerce Clause jurisprudence has “identified three broad categories of activity that Congress may regulate under its commerce power.” *609514 U. S., at 558 (citing Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Assn., Inc., 452 U. S. 264, 276-277 (1981); Perez v. United States, 402 U. S. 146, 150 (1971)). “First, Congress may regulate the use of the channels of interstate commerce.” 514 U. S., at 558 (citing Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U. S. 241, 256 (1964); United States v. Darby, 312 U. S. 100, 114 (1941)). “Second, Congress is empowered to regulate and protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, or persons or things in interstate commerce, even though the threat may come only from intrastate activities.” 514 U. S., at 558 (citing Shreveport Rate Cases, 234 U. S. 342 (1914); Southern R. Co. v. United States, 222 U. S. 20 (1911); Perez, supra, at 150). “Finally, Congress’ commerce authority includes the power to regulate those activities having a substantial relation to interstate commerce,... 1 e., those activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.” 514 U. S., at 558-559 (citing Jones & Laughlin Steel, supra, at 37).

Petitioners do not contend that these cases fall within either of the first two of these categories of Commerce Clause regulation. They seek to sustain § 13981 as a regulation of activity that substantially affects interstate commerce. Given § 13981’s focus on gender-motivated violence wherever it occurs (rather than violence directed at the in-strumentalities of interstate commerce, interstate markets, or things or persons in interstate commerce), we agree that this is the proper inquiry.

Since Lopez most recently canvassed and clarified our case law governing this third category of Commerce Clause regulation, it provides the proper framework for conducting the required analysis of § 13981. In Lopez, we held that the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990,18 U. S. C. § 922(q)(l)(A), which made it a federal crime to knowingly possess a firearm in a school zone, exceeded Congress’ authority under the Commerce Clause. See 514 U. S., at 551. Several significant considerations contributed to our decision.

*610First, we observed that §922(q) was “a criminal statute that by its terms has nothing to do with ‘commerce’ or any sort of economic enterprise, however broadly one might define those terms.” Id., at 561. Reviewing our case law, we noted that “we have upheld a wide variety of congressional Acts regulating intrastate economic activity where we have concluded that the activity substantially affected interstate commerce.” Id., at 559. Although we cited only a few examples, including Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S. 111 (1942); Hodel, supra; Perez, supra; Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U. S. 294 (1964); and Heart of Atlanta Motel, supra, we stated that the pattern of analysis is clear. Lopez, 514 U. S., at 559-560. “Where economic activity substantially affects interstate commerce, legislation regulating that activity will be sustained.” Id., at 560.

Both petitioners and Justice Souter’s dissent downplay the role that the economic nature of the regulated activity plays in our Commerce Clause analysis. But a fair reading of Lopez shows that the noneconomic, criminal nature of the conduct at issue was central to our decision in that case. See, e. g., id., at 551 (“The Act [does not] regulat[e] a commercial activity”), 560 (“Even Wickard, which is perhaps the most far reaching example of Commerce Clause authority over intrastate activity, involved economic activity in a way that the possession of a gun in a school zone does not”), 561 (“Section 922(q) is not an essential part of a larger regulation of economic activity”), 566 (“Admittedly, a determination whether an intrastate activity is commercial or noncommercial may in some cases result in legal uncertainty. But, so long as Congress’ authority is limited to those powers enumerated in the Constitution, and so long as those enumerated powers are interpreted as having judicially enforceable outer limits, congressional legislation under the Commerce Clause always will engender ‘legal uncertainty’ ”), 567 (“The possession of a gun in a local school zone is in no sense an economic activity that might, through repetition *611elsewhere, substantially affect any sort of interstate commerce”); see also id., at 573-574 (Kennedy, J., concurring) (stating that Lopez did not alter our “practical conception of commercial regulation” and that Congress may “regulate in the commercial sphere on the assumption that we have a single market and a unified purpose to build a stable national economy”), 577 (“Were the Federal Government to take over the regulation of entire areas of traditional state concern, areas having nothing to do with the regulation of commercial activities, the boundaries between the spheres of federal and state authority would blur”), 580 (“[Ujnlike the earlier cases to come before the Court here neither the actors nor their conduct has a commercial character, and neither the purposes nor the design of the statute has an evident commercial nexus. The statute makes the simple possession of a gun within 1,000 feet of the grounds of the school a criminal offense. In a sense any conduct in this interdependent world of ours has an ultimate commercial origin or consequence, but we have not yet said the commerce power may reach so far” (citation omitted)). Lopez’s review of Commerce Clause case law demonstrates that in those cases where we have sustained federal regulation of intrastate activity based upon the activity’s substantial effects on interstate commerce, the activity in question has been some sort of economic endeavor. See id., at 559-560.4

The second consideration that we found important in analyzing §922(q) was that the statute contained “no express jurisdictional element which might limit its reach to a discrete set of firearm possessions that additionally have *612an explicit connection with or effect on interstate commerce.” Id., at 562. Such a jurisdictional element may establish that the enactment is in pursuance of Congress’ regulation of interstate commerce.

Third, we noted that neither § 922(q) “ ‘nor its legislative history contain[s] express congressional findings regarding the effects upon interstate commerce of gun possession in a school zone.’ ” Ibid, (quoting Brief for United States, O. T. 1994, No. 93-1260, pp. 5-6). While "Congress normally is not required to make formal findings as to the substantial burdens that an activity has on interstate commerce,” 514 U. S., at 562 (citing McClung, supra, at 304; Perez, 402 U. S., at 156), the existence of such findings may “enable us to evaluate the legislative judgment that the activity in question substantially affect[s] interstate commerce, even though no such substantial effect [is] visible to the naked eye.” 514 U. S., at 563.

Finally, our decision in Lopez rested in part on the fact that the link between gun possession and a substantial effect on interstate commerce was attenuated. Id., at 563-567. The United States argued that the possession of guns may lead to violent crime, and that violent crime “can be expected to affect the functioning of the national economy in two ways. First, the costs of violent crime are substantial, and, through the mechanism of insurance, those costs are spread throughout the population. Second, violent crime reduces the willingness of individuals to travel to areas within the country that are perceived to be unsafe.” Id., at 563-564 (citation omitted). The Government also argued that the presence of guns at schools poses a threat to the educational process, which in turn threatens to produce a less efficient and productive work force, which will negatively affect national productivity and thus interstate commerce. Ibid.

We rejected these “costs of crime” and “national productivity” arguments because they would permit Congress *613to “regulate not only all violent crime, but all activities that might lead to violent crime, regardless of how tenuously they relate to interstate commerce.” Id., at 564. We noted that, under this but-for reasoning:

“Congress could regulate any activity that it found was related to the economic productivity of individual citizens: family law (including marriage, divorce, and child custody), for example. Under the[se] theories ..., it is difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power, even in areas such as criminal law enforcement or education where States historically have been sovereign. Thus, if we were to accept the Government’s arguments, we are hard pressed to posit any activity by an individual that Congress is without power to regulate.” Ibid.

With these principles underlying our Commerce Clause jurisprudence as reference points, the proper resolution of the present cases is clear. Gender-motivated crimes of violence are not, in any sense of the phrase, economic activity. While we need not adopt a categorical rule against aggregating the effects of any noneconomic activity in order to decide these cases, thus far in our Nation’s history our cases have upheld Commerce Clause regulation of intrastate activity only where that activity is economic in nature. See, e. g., id., at 559-560, and the cases cited therein.

Like the Gun-Free School Zones Act at issue in Lopez, § 13981 contains no jurisdictional element establishing that the federal cause of action is in pursuance of Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. Although Lopez makes clear that such a jurisdictional element would lend support to the argument that § 13981 is sufficiently tied to interstate commerce, Congress elected to cast § 13981’s remedy over a wider, and more purely intrastate, body of violent crime.5

*614In contrast with the lack of congressional findings that we faced in Lopez, §13981 is supported by numerous findings regarding the serious impact that gender-motivated violence has on victims and their families. See, e. g., H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 103-711, p. 385 (1994); S. Rep. No. 103-138, p. 40 (1993); S. Rep. No. 101-545, p. 33 (1990). But the existence of congressional findings is not sufficient, by itself, to sustain the constitutionality of Commerce Clause legislation. As we stated in Lopez, “ ‘[Sjimply because Congress may conclude that a particular activity substantially affects interstate commerce does not necessarily make it so.’ ” 514 U. S., at 557, n. 2 (quoting Hodel, 452 U. S., at 311 (Rehnquist, J., concurring in judgment)). Rather, “ ‘[w]hether particular operations affect interstate commerce sufficiently to come under the constitutional power of Congress to regulate them is ultimately a judicial rather than a legislative question, and can be settled finally only by this Court.’” 514 U. S., at 557, n. 2 (quoting Heart of Atlanta Motel, 379 U. S., at 273 (Black, J., concurring)).

*615In these cases, Congress’ findings are substantially weakened by the fact that they rely so heavily on a method of reasoning that we have already rejected as unworkable if we are to maintain the Constitution’s enumeration of powers. Congress found that gender-motivated violence affects interstate commerce

“by deterring potential victims from traveling interstate, from engaging in employment in interstate business, and from transacting with business, and in places involved in interstate commerce;... by diminishing national productivity, increasing medical and other costs, and decreasing the supply of and the demand for interstate products.” H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 103-711, at 385.

Accord, S. Rep. No. 103-138, at 54. Given these findings and petitioners’ arguments, the concern that we expressed in Lopez that Congress might use the Commerce Clause to completely obliterate the Constitution’s distinction between national and local authority seems well founded. See Lopez, supra, at 564. The reasoning that petitioners advance seeks to follow the but-for causal chain from the initial occurrence of violent crime (the suppression of which has always been the prime object of the States’ police power) to every attenuated effect upon interstate commerce. If accepted, petitioners’ reasoning would allow Congress to regulate any crime as long as the nationwide, aggregated impact of that crime has substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption. Indeed, if Congress may regulate gender-motivated violence, it would be able to regulate murder or any other type of violence since gender-motivated violence, as a subset of all violent crime, is certain to have lesser economic impacts than the larger class of which it is a part.

Petitioners’ reasoning, moreover, will not limit Congress to regulating violence but may, as we suggested in Lopez, be applied equally as well to family law and other areas of traditional state regulation since the aggregate effect of *616marriage, divorce, and childrearing on the national economy is undoubtedly significant. Congress may have recognized this specter when it expressly precluded § 13981 from being used in the family law context.6 See 42 U. S. C. § 13981(e)(4). Under our written Constitution, however, the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.7 See Lopez, supra, at 575-579 (Kennedy, J., concurring); Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 176-178.

*617We accordingly reject the argument that Congress may regulate noneconomic, violent criminal conduct based solely on that conduct’s aggregate effect on interstate commerce. The Constitution requires a distinction between what is *618truly national and what is truly local. Lopez, 514 U. S., at 568 (citing Jones & Laughlin Steel, 301 U. S., at 30). In recognizing this fact we preserve one of the few principles that has been consistent since the Clause was adopted. The regulation and punishment of intrastate violence that is not directed at the instrumentalities, channels, or goods involved in interstate commerce has always been the province of the States. See, e. g., Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264, 426, 428 (1821) (Marshall, C. J.) (stating that Congress “has no general right to punish murder committed within any of the States,” and that it is “clear . . . that congress cannot punish felonies generally”). Indeed, we can think of no better example of the police power, which the Founders denied the National Government and reposed in the States, than the suppression of violent crime and vindication of its victims.3 See, e. g., Lopez, 514 U. S., at 566 (“The Constitution . . . withhold[s] from Congress a plenary police power”); id., at 584-585 (Thomas, J., concurring) (“[W]e always have rejected read*619ings of the Commerce Clause and the scope of federal power that would permit Congress to exercise a police power”), 596-597, and n. 6 (noting that the first Congresses did not enact nationwide punishments for criminal conduct under the Commerce Clause).

III

Because we conclude that the Commerce Clause does not provide Congress with authority to enact § 13981, we address petitioners’ alternative argument that the section’s civil remedy should be upheld as an exercise of Congress’ remedial power under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. As noted above, Congress expressly invoked the Fourteenth Amendment as a source of authority to enact § 13981.

The principles governing an analysis of congressional legislation under §5 are well settled. Section 5 states that Congress may “ 'enforce’ by 'appropriate legislation’ the constitutional guarantee that no State shall deprive any person of 'life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,’ nor deny any person 'equal protection of the laws.’ ” City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U. S. 507, 517 (1997). Section 5 is “a positive grant of legislative power,” Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U. S. 641, 651 (1966), that includes authority to “prohibi[t] conduct which is not itself unconstitutional and [to] intrud[e] into ‘legislative spheres of autonomy previously reserved to the States.’ ” Flores, supra, at 518 (quoting Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, 427 U. S. 445, 455 (1976)); see also Kimel v. Florida Bd. of Regents, 528 U. S. 62, 81 (2000). However, “[a]s broad as the congressional enforcement power is, it is not unlimited.” Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U. S. 112, 128 (1970); see also Kimel, supra, at 81. In fact, as we discuss in detail below, several limitations inherent in §5’s text and constitutional context have been recognized since the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted.

Petitioners’ § 5 argument is founded on an assertion that there is pervasive bias in various state justice systems against victims of gender-motivated violence. This asser*620tion is supported by a voluminous congressional record. Specifically, Congress received evidence that many participants in state justice systems are perpetuating an array of erroneous stereotypes and assumptions. Congress concluded that these discriminatory stereotypes often result in insufficient investigation and prosecution of gender-motivated crime, inappropriate focus on the behavior and credibility of the victims of that crime, and unacceptably lenient punishments for those who are actually convicted of gender-motivated violence. See H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 103-711, at 385-386; S. Rep. No. 103-138, at 38, 41-55; S. Rep. No. 102-197, at 33-35, 41, 43-47. Petitioners contend that this bias denies victims of gender-motivated violence the equal protection of the laws and that Congress therefore acted appropriately in enacting a private civil remedy against the perpetrators of gender-motivated violence to both remedy the States' bias and deter future instances of discrimination in the state courts.

As our cases have established, state-sponsored gender discrimination violates equal protection unless it “-‘serves “important governmental objectives and . . . the discriminatory means employed” are “substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.” ’ ” United States v. Virginia, 518 U. S. 515, 533 (1996) (quoting Mississippi Univ. for Women v. Hogan, 458 U. S. 718, 724 (1982), in turn quoting Wengler v. Druggists Mut. Ins. Co., 446 U. S. 142, 150 (1980)). See also Craig v. Boren, 429 U. S. 190, 198-199 (1976). However, the language and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment place certain limitations on the manner in which Congress may attack discriminatory conduct. These limitations are necessary to prevent the Fourteenth Amendment from obliterating the Framers’ carefully crafted balance of power between the States and the National Government. See Flores, supra, at 520-524 (reviewing the history of the Fourteenth Amendment’s enactment and discussing the contemporary belief that the Amendment “ ‘does *621not concentrate power in the general government for any purpose of police government within the States’ ”) (quoting T. Cooley, Constitutional Limitations 294, n. 1 (2d ed. 1871)). Foremost among these limitations is the time-honored principle that the Fourteenth Amendment, by its very terms, prohibits only state action. “[T]he principle has become firmly embedded in our constitutional law that the action inhibited by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment is only such action as may fairly be said to be that of the States. That Amendment erects no shield against merely private conduct, however discriminatory or wrongful.” Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U. S. 1, 13, and n. 12 (1948).

Shortly after the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, we decided two cases interpreting the Amendment’s provisions, United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629 (1883), and the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3 (1883). In Harris, the Court considered a challenge to §2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. That section sought to punish “private persons” for “conspiring to deprive any one of the equal protection of the laws enacted by the State.” 106 U. S., at 639. We concluded that this law exceeded Congress’ §5 power because the law was “directed exclusively against the action of private persons, without reference to the laws of the State, or their administration by her officers.” Id., at 640. In so doing, we reemphasized our statement from Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 318 (1880), that “ ‘these provisions of the fourteenth amendment have reference to State action exclusively, and not to any action of private individuals.’” Harris, supra, at 639 (misquotation in Harris).

We reached a similar conclusion in the Civil Rights Cases. In those consolidated cases, we held that the public accommodation provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which applied to purely private conduct, were beyond the scope of the § 5 enforcement power. 109 U. S., at 11 (“Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the [Fourteenth] [Ajmendment”). See also, e. g., Romer v. *622Evans, 517 U. S. 620, 628 (1996) (“[I]t was settled early that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress a general power to prohibit discrimination in public accommodations”); Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co., 457 U. S. 922, 936 (1982) (“Careful adherence to the ‘state action’ requirement preserves an area of individual freedom by limiting the reach of federal law and federal judicial power”); Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U. S. 991, 1002 (1982); Moose Lodge No. 107 v. Irvis, 407 U. S. 163, 172 (1972); Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co., 398 U. S. 144, 147, n. 2 (1970); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 554 (1876) (“The fourteenth amendment prohibits a state from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another. It simply furnishes an additional guaranty against any encroachment by the States upon the fundamental rights which belong to every citizen as a member of society”).

The force of the doctrine of stare decisis behind these decisions stems not only from the length of time they have been on the books, but also from the insight attributable to the Members of the Court at that time. Every Member had been appointed by President Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, or Arthur — and each of their judicial appointees obviously had intimate knowledge and familiarity with the events surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Petitioners contend that two more recent decisions have in effect overruled this longstanding limitation on Congress’ § 5 authority. They rely on United States v. Guest, 383 U. S. 745 (1966), for the proposition that the rule laid down in the Civil Rights Cases is no longér good law. In Guest, the Court reversed the construction of an indictment under 18 U. S. C. §241, saying in the course of its opinion that “we deal here with issues of statutory construction, not with issues of constitutional power.” 383 U. S., at 749. Three Members of the Court, in a separate opinion by Justice Brennan, expressed the view that the Civil Rights Cases *623were wrongly decided, and that Congress could under §5 prohibit actions by private individuals. 383 U. S., at 774 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). Three other Members of the Court, who joined the opinion of the Court, joined a separate opinion by Justice Clark which in two or three sentences stated the conclusion that Congress could “punis[h] all conspiracies — with or without state action — that interfere with Fourteenth Amendment rights,” Id., at 762 (concurring opinion). Justice Harlan, in another separate opinion, commented with respect to the statement by these Justices:

“The action of three of the Justices who joined the Court’s opinion in nonetheless cursorily pronouncing themselves on the far-reaching constitutional questions deliberately not reached in Part II seems to me, to say the very least, extraordinary.” Id., at 762, n. 1 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part).

Though these three Justices saw fit to opine on matters not before the Court in Guest, the Court had no occasion to revisit the Civil Rights Cases and Harris, having determined “the indictment [charging private individuals with conspiring to deprive blacks of equal access to state facilities] in fact contained] an express allegation of state involvement.” 383 U. S., at 756. The Court concluded that the implicit allegation of “active connivance by agents of the State” eliminated any need to decide “the threshold, level that state action must attain in order to create rights under the Equal Protection Clause.” Ibid. All of this Justice Clark explicitly acknowledged. See id., at 762 (concurring opinion) (“The Court’s interpretation of the indictment clearly avoids the question whether Congress, by appropriate legislation, has the power to punish private conspiracies that interfere with Fourteenth Amendment rights, such as the right to utilize public facilities”).

*624To accept petitioners’ argument, moreover, one must add to the three Justices joining Justice Brennan’s reasoned explanation for his belief that the Civil Rights Cases were wrongly decided, the three Justices joining Justice Clark’s opinion who gave no explanation whatever for their similar view. This is simply not the way that reasoned constitutional adjudication proceeds. We accordingly have no hesitation in saying that it would take more than the naked dicta contained in Justice Clark’s opinion, when added to Justice Brennan’s opinion, to cast any doubt upon the enduring vitality of the Civil Rights Cases and Harris.

Petitioners also rely on District of Columbia v. Carter, 409 U. S. 418 (1973). Carter was a case addressing the question whether the District of Columbia was a “State” within the meaning of Rev. Stat. § 1979,42 U. S. C. § 1983 — a section which by its terms requires state action before it may be employed. A footnote in that opinion recites the same litany respecting Guest that petitioners rely on. This litany is of course entirely dicta, and in any event cannot rise above its source. We believe that the description of the § 5 power contained in the Civil Rights Cases is correct:

“But where a subject is not submitted to the general legislative power of Congress, but is only submitted thereto for the purpose of rendering effective some prohibition against particular [s]tate legislation or [sjtate action in reference to that subject, the power given is limited by its object, and any legislation by Congress in the matter must necessarily be corrective in its character, adapted to counteract and redress the operation of such prohibited state laws or proceedings of [s]tate officers.” 109 U. S., at 18.

Petitioners alternatively argue that, unlike the situation in the Civil Rights Cases, here there has been gender-based disparate treatment by state authorities, whereas in those cases there was no indication of such state action. There is *625abundant evidence, however, to show that the Congresses that enacted the Civil Rights Acts of 1871 and 1875 had a purpose similar to that of Congress in enacting §18981: There were state laws on the books bespeaking equality of treatment, but in the administration of these laws there was discrimination against newly freed slaves. The statement of Representative Garfield in the House and that of Senator Sumner in the Senate are representative:

“[T]he chief complaint is not that the laws of the State are unequal, but that even where the laws are just and equal on their face, yet, by a systematic maladministration of them, or a neglect or refusal to enforce their provisions, a portion of the people are denied equal protection under them.” Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 1st Sess., App. 153 (1871) (statement of Rep. Garfield).

“The Legislature of South Carolina has passed a law giving precisely the rights contained in your ‘supplementary civil rights bill.’ But such a law remains a dead letter on her statute-books, because the State courts, comprised largely of those whom the Senator wishes to obtain amnesty for, refuse to enforce it.” Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 2d Sess., 430 (1872) (statement of Sen. Sumner).

See also, e. g., Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 1st Sess., at 653 (statement of Sen. Osborn); id., at 457 (statement of Rep. Coburn); id., at App. 78 (statement of Rep. Perry); 2 Cong. Rec. 457 (1874) (statement of Rep. Butler); 3 Cong. Rec. 945 (1875) (statement of Rep. Lynch).

But even if that distinction were valid, we do not believe it would save § 13981’s civil remedy. For the remedy is simply not “corrective in its character, adapted to counteract and redress the operation of such prohibited [s]tate laws or proceedings of [sjtate officers.” Civil Rights Cases, supra, at 18. Or, as we have phrased it in more recent cases, prophylactic legislation under §5 must have a “‘congru*626ence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end.” Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Ed. Expense Bd. v. College Savings Bank, 527 U. S. 627, 639 (1999); Flores, 521 U. S., at 526. Section 13981 is not aimed at proscribing discrimination by officials which the Fourteenth Amendment might not itself proscribe; it is directed not at any State or state actor, but at individuals who have committed criminal acts motivated by gender bias.

In the present cases, for example, §13981 visits no consequence whatever on any Virginia public official involved in investigating or prosecuting Brzonkala’s assault. The section is, therefore, unlike any of the § 5 remedies that we have previously upheld. For example, in Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U. S. 641 (1966), Congress prohibited New York from imposing literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting because it found that such a requirement disenfranchised thousands of Puerto Rican immigrants who had been educated in the Spanish language of their home territory. That law, which we upheld, was directed at New York officials who administered the State’s election law and prohibited them from using a provision of that law. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301 (1966), Congress imposed voting rights requirements on States that, Congress found, had a history of discriminating against blacks in voting. The remedy was also directed at state officials in those States. Similarly, in Ex parte Virginia, 100 U. S. 339 (1880), Congress criminally punished state officials who intentionally discriminated in jury selection; again, the remedy was directed to the culpable state official.

Section 13981 is also different from these previously upheld remedies in that it applies uniformly throughout the Nation. Congress’ findings indicate that the problem of discrimination against the victims of gender-motivated crimes does not exist in all States, or even most States. By contrast, the § 5 remedy upheld in Katzenbach v. Morgan, supra, *627was directed only to the State where the evil found by Congress existed, and in South Carolina v. Katzenbach, supra, the remedy was directed only to those States in which Congress found that there had been discrimination.

For these reasons, we conclude that Congress’ power under § 5 does not extend to the enactment of § 13981.

> > — {

Petitioner Brzonkala’s complaint alleges that she was the victim of a brutal assault. But Congress’ effort in § 13981 to provide a federal civil remedy can be sustained neither under the Commerce Clause nor under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the allegations here are true, no civilized system of justice could fail to provide her a remedy for the conduct of respondent Morrison. But under our federal system that remedy must be provided by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and not by the United States. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is

Affirmed.

1

The panel affirmed the dismissal of Brzonkala’s Title IX disparate treatment claim. See 132 F. 3d, at 961-962.

2

The en banc Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court’s conclusion that Brzonkala failed to state a claim alleging disparate treatment under Title IX, but vacated the District Court’s dismissal of her hostile environment claim and remanded with instructions for the District Court to hold the claim in abeyance pending this Court’s decision in Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Ed., 526 U. S. 629 (1999). Brzonkala v. Virginia Polytechnic and State Univ., 169 F. 3d 820, 827, n. 2 (CA4 1999). Our grant of certiorari did not encompass Brzohkala’s Title IX claims, and we thus do not consider them in this opinion.

3

Justice Souter’s dissent takes us to task for allegedly abandoning Jones & Laughlin Steel in favor of an inadequate “federalism of some earlier time.” Post, at 641-643, 655. As the foregoing language from Jones & Laughlin Steel makes clear however, this Court has always recognized a limit on the commerce power inherent in “our dual system of government.” 301 U. S., at 37. It is the dissent’s remarkable theory that the commerce power is without judicially enforceable boundaries that disregards the Court’s caution in Jones & Laughlin Steel against allowing that power to “effectually obliterate the distinction between what is national and what is local.” Ibid. ■

4

Justice Souter’s dissent does not reconcile its analysis with our holding in Lopez because it apparently would cast that decision aside. See post, at 637-643. However, the dissent cannot persuasively contradict Lopez’s conclusion that, in every case where we have sustained federal regulation under the aggregation principle in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S. 111 (1942), the regulated activity was of an apparent commercial character. See, e. g., Lopez, 514 U. S., at 559-560, 580.

5

Title 42 U. S. C. § 13981 is not the sole provision of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 to provide a federal remedy for gender-motivated crime. Section 40221(a) of the Act creates a federal criminal remedy to *614punish “interstate crimes of abuse including crimes committed against spouses or intimate partners during interstate travel and crimes committed by spouses or intimate partners who cross State lines to continue the abuse.” S. Rep. No. 103-138, p. 43 (1993). That criminal provision has been codified at 18 U. S. C. § 2261(a)(1), which states:

“A person who travels across a State line or enters or leaves Indian country with the intent to injure, harass, or intimidate that person’s spouse or intimate partner, and who, in the course of or as a result of such travel, intentionally commits a crime of violence and thereby causes bodily injury to such spouse or intimate partner, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).”

The Courts of Appeals have uniformly upheld this criminal sanction as an appropriate exercise of Congress’ Commerce Clause authority, reasoning that “[t]he provision properly falls within the first of Lopez’s categories as it regulates the use of channels of interstate commerce — i. e., the use of the interstate transportation routes through which persons and goods move.” United States v. Lankford, 196 F. 3d 563, 571-572 (CA5 1999) (collecting cases) (internal quotation marks omitted).

6

We are not the first to recognize that the but -for causal chain must have its limits in the Commerce Clause area. In Lopez, 514 U. S., at 567, we quoted Justice Cardozo’s concurring opinion in A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495 (1935):

“There is a view of causation that would obliterate the distinction between what is national and what is local in the activities of commerce. Motion at the outer rim is communicated perceptibly, though minutely, to recording instruments at the center. A society such as ours ‘is an elastic medium which transmits all tremors throughout its territoiy; the only question is of their size.’ ” Id., at 554 (quoting United States v. A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp., 76 F. 2d 617, 624 (CA2 1935) (L. Hand, J., concurring)).

7

Justice Souter’s theory that Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1 (1824), Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528 (1985), and the Seventeenth Amendment provide the answer to these cases, see post, at 645-652, is remarkable because it undermines this central principle of our constitutional system. As we have repeatedly noted, the Framers crafted the federal system of Government so that the people’s rights would be secured by the division of power. See, e. g., Arizona v. Evans, 514 U. S. 1, 30 (1995) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U. S. 452, 458-459 (1991) (cataloging the benefits of the federal design); Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon, 473 U. S. 234, 242 (1985) (“The ‘constitutionally mandated balance of power’ between the States and the Federal Government was adopted by the Framers to ensure the protection of ‘our fundamental liberties’ ”) (quoting Garcia, supra, at 572 (Powell, J., dissenting)). Departing from their parliamentary past, the Framers adopted a written Constitution that further divided authority at the federal level so that the Constitution’s provisions would not be defined solely by the political branches nor the scope of legislative power limited only by public opinion and the Legislature’s self-restraint. See, e. g., Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 176 (1803) (Marshall, C. J.) (“The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written”). It is thus a “ ‘per*617manent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system’ ” that “ ‘the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution.’” Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900, 922-923 (1995) (quoting Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1,18 (1958)).

No doubt the political branches have a role in interpreting and applying the Constitution, but ever since Marbury this Court has remained the ultimate expositor of the constitutional text. As we emphasized in United States v. Nixon, 418 U. S. 683 (1974): “In the performance of assigned constitutional duties each branch of the Government must initially interpret the Constitution, and the interpretation of its powers by any branch is due great respect from the others. . . . Many decisions of this Court, however, have unequivocally reaffirmed the holding of Marbury that ‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’ ” Id., at 703 (citation omitted).

Contrary to Justice Soutee’s suggestion, see post, at 647-652, and n. 14, Gibbons did not exempt the commerce power from this cardinal rule of constitutional law. His assertion that, from Gibbons on, public opinion has been the only restraint on the congressional exercise of the commerce power is true only insofar as it contends that political accountability is and has been the only limit on Congress’ exercise of the commerce power within that power’s outer bounds. As the language surrounding that relied upon by Justice Soutek makes clear, Gibbons did not remove from this Court the authority to define that boundary. See Gibbons, supra, at 194-195 (“It is not intended to say that these words comprehend that commerce, which is completely internal, which is carried on between man and man in a State, or between different parts of the same State, and which does not extend to or affect other States. . . . Comprehensive as the word ‘among’ is, it may very properly be restricted to that commerce which concerns more States than one. The phrase is not one which would probably have been selected to indicate the completely interior traffic of a State, because it is not an apt phrase for that purpose; and the enumeration of the particular classes of commerce to which the power was to be extended, would not have been made, had the intention been to extend the power to every description. The enumeration presupposes something not enumerated; and that something, if we regard the language or the subject of the sentence, must be the exclusively internal commerce of a State”).

3

Justice Soutee disputes our assertion that the Constitution reserves the general police power to the States, noting that the Founders failed to adopt several proposals for additional guarantees against federal encroachment on state authority. See post, at 645-646, and n. 14. This argument is belied by the entire structure of the Constitution. With its careful enumeration of federal powers and explicit statement that all powers not granted to the Federal Government are reserved, the Constitution cannot realistically be interpreted as granting the Federal Government an unlimited license to regulate. See, e. g., New York v. United States, 505 U. S. 144, 156-157 (1992). And, as discussed above, the Constitution’s separation of federal power and the creation of the Judicial Branch indicate that disputes regarding the extent of congressional power are largely subject to judicial review. See n. 7, supra. Moreover, the principle that “'[t]he Constitution created a Federal Government of limited powers,”’ while reserving a generalized police power to the States, is deeply ingrained in our constitutional history. New York, supra, at 155 (quoting Gregory v. Ashcroft, supra, at 457); see also Lopez, 514 U. S., at 584-599 (Thomas, J., concurring) (discussing the history of the debates surrounding the adoption of the Commerce Clause and our subsequent interpretation of the Clause); Maryland v. Wirtz, 392 U. S. 183, 196 (1968).

Justice Thomas,

concurring.

The majority opinion correetly applies our decision in United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549 (1995), and I join it in full. I write separately only to express my view that the very notion of a “substantial effects” test under the Commerce Clause is inconsistent with the original understanding of Congress’ powers and with this Court’s early Commerce Clause cases. By continuing to apply this rootless and malleable standard, however circumscribed, the Court has encouraged the Federal Government to persist in its view that the Commerce Clause has virtually no limits. Until this Court replaces its existing Commerce Clause jurisprudence with a standard more consistent with the original understanding, we will continue to see Congress appropriating state police powers under the guise of regulating commerce.

*628Justice Souter,

with whom Justice Stevens, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer join, dissenting.

The Court says both that it leaves Commerce Clause precedent undisturbed and that the Civil Rights Remedy of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, 42 U. S. C. § 13981, exceeds Congress’s power under that Clause. I find the claims irreconcilable and respectfully dissent.1

I

Our eases, which remain at least nominally undisturbed, stand for the following propositions. Congress has the power to legislate with regard to activity that, in the aggregate, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce. See Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S. 111, 124-128 (1942); Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Assn., Inc., 452 U. S. 264, 277 (1981). The fact of such a substantial effect is not an issue for the courts in the first instance, ibid., but for the Congress, whose institutional capacity for gathering evidence and taking testimony far exceeds ours. By passing legislation, Congress indicates its conclusion, whether explicitly or not, that facts support its exercise of the commerce power. The business of the courts is to review the congressional assessment, not for soundness but simply for the rationality of concluding that a jurisdictional basis exists in fact. See ibid. Any explicit findings that Congress chooses to make, though not dispositive of the question of rationality, may advance judicial review by identifying factual authority on which Congress relied. Applying those propositions in these cases can lead to only one conclusion.

One obvious difference from United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549 (1995), is the mountain of data assembled by Con*629gress, here showing the effects of violence against women on interstate commerce.2 Passage of the Act in 1994 was preceded by four years of hearings,3 which included testimony from physicians and law professors;4 from survivors *630of rape and domestic violence;5 and from representatives of state law enforcement and private business.6 The record includes reports on gender bias from task forces in 21 States,7 and we have the benefit of specific factual findings *631in the eight separate Reports issued by Congress and its committees over the long course leading to enactment.8 Cf. Hodel, 452 U. S., at 278-279 (noting “extended hearings,” “vast amounts of testimony and documentary evidence,” and “years of the most thorough legislative consideration”).

With respect to domestic violence, Congress received evidence for the following findings:

“Three out of four American women will be victims of violent crimes sometime during their life.” H. R. Rep. No. 103-395, p. 25 (1993) (citing U. S. Dept, of Justice, Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice 29 (2d ed. 1988)).

“Violence is the leading cause of injuries to women ages 15 to 44_” S. Rep. No. 103-188, p. 38 (1993) (citing Surgeon General Antonia Novello, From the Surgeon General, U. S. Public Health Services, 267 JAMA 3132 (1992)).

“[A]s many as 50 percent of homeless women and children are fleeing domestic violence.” S. Rep. No. 101— 545, p. 37 (1990) (citing E. Schneider, Legal Reform Efforts for Battered Women: Past, Present, and Future (July 1990)).

“Since 1974, the assault rate against women has outstripped the rate for men by at least twice for some age groups and far more for others.” S. Rep. No. 101-*632545, at 30 (citing Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization in the United States (1974) (Table 5)).

“[B]attering ‘is the single largest cause of injury to women in the United States.’” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 37 (quoting Van Hightower & McManus, Limits of State Constitutional Guarantees: Lessons from Efforts to Implement Domestic Violence Policies, 49 Pub. Admin. Rev. 269 (May/June 1989).

“An estimated 4 million American women are battered each year by their husbands or partners.” H. R. Rep. No. 103-395, at 26 (citing Council on Scientific Affairs, American Medical Assn., Violence Against Women: Relevance for Medical Practitioners, 267 JAMA 3184, 3185 (1992).

“Over 1 million women in the United States seek medical assistance each year for injuries sustained [from] their husbands or other partners.” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 37 (citing Stark & Flitcraft, Medical Therapy as Repression: The Case of the Battered Woman, Health & Medicine (Summer/Fall 1982).

“Between 2,000 and 4,000 women die every year from [domestic] abuse.” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 36 (citing Schneider, supra).

“[A]rrest rates may be as low as 1 for every 100 domestic assaults.” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 38 (citing Dutton, Profiling of Wife Assaulters: Preliminary Evidence for Trimodal Analysis, 3 Violence and Victims 5-30 (1988)).

“Partial estimates show that violent crime against women costs this country at least 3 billion — not million, but billion — dollars a year.” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 33 (citing Schneider, supra, at 4).

“[Estimates suggest that we spend $5 to $10 billion a year on health care, criminal justice, and other social costs of domestic violence.” S. Rep. No. 103-138, at *63341 (citing Biden, Domestic Violence: A Crime, Not a Quarrel, Trial 56 (June 1993)).

The evidence as to rape was similarly extensive, supporting these conclusions:

“[The incidence of] rape rose four times as fast as the total national crime rate over the past 10 years.” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 30 (citing Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports (1988)).

“According to one study, close to half a million girls now in high school will be raped before they graduate.” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 31 (citing R. Warshaw, I Never Called it Rape 117 (1988)).

“[One hundred twenty-five thousand] college women can expect to be raped during this — or any — year.” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 43 (citing testimony of Dr. Mary Koss before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Aug. 29, 1990).

“[T]hree-quarters of women never go to the movies alone after dark because of the fear of rape and nearly 50 percent do not use public transit alone after dark for the same reason.” S. Rep, No. 102-197, p. 38 (1991) (citing M. Gordon & S. Riger, The Female Fear 15 (1989)).

“[Forty-one] percent of judges surveyed believed that juries give sexual assault victims less credibility than other crime victims.” S. Rep. No. 102-197, at 47 (citing Colorado Supreme Court Task Force on Gender Bias in the Courts, Gender & Justice in the Colorado Courts 91 (1990)).

“Less than 1 percent of all [rape] victims have collected damages.” S. Rep. No. 102-197, at 44 (citing report by Jury Verdict Research, Inc.).

“ ‘[A]n individual who commits rape has only about 4 chances in 100 of being arrested, prosecuted, and found guilty of any offense.’ ” S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 33, n. 30 *634(quoting H. Feild & L. Bienen, Jurors and Rape: A Study in Psychology and Law 95 (1980)).

“Almost one-quarter of convicted rapists never go to prison and another quarter received sentences in local jails where the average sentence is 11 months.” S. Rep. No. 103-138, at 38 (citing Majority Staff Report of Senate Committee on the Judiciary, The Response to Rape: Detours on the Road to Equal Justice, 103d Cong., 1st Sess., 2 (Comm. Print 1993)).

“[AJlmost 50 percent of rape victims lose their jobs or are forced to quit because of the crime’s severity.” S. Rep. No. 102-197, at 53 (citing Ellis, Atkeson, & Calhoun, An Assessment of Long-Term Reaction to Rape, 90 J. Abnormal Psych., No. 3, p. 264 (1981).

Based on the- data thus partially summarized, Congress found that

“crimes of violence motivated by gender have a substantial adverse effect on interstate commerce, by deterring potential victims from traveling interstate, from engaging in employment in interstate business, and from transacting with business, and in places involved, in interstate commerce ...[,] by diminishing national productivity, increasing medical and other costs, and decreasing the supply of and the demand for interstate products . . . .” H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 103-711, p. 385 (1994).

Congress thereby explicitly stated the predicate for the exercise of its Commerce Clause power. Is its conclusion irrational in view, of the data amassed? True, the methodology of particular studies may be challenged, and some of the figures arrived at may be disputed. But the sufficiency of the evidence before Congress to provide a rational basis for the finding cannot seriously be questioned. Cf. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 520 U. S. 180, 199 (1997) *635(“The Constitution gives to Congress the role of weighing conflicting evidence in the legislative process”).

Indeed, the legislative record here is far more voluminous than the record compiled by Congress and found sufficient in two prior cases upholding Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against Commerce Clause challenges. In Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U. S. 241 (1964), and Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U. S. 294 (1964), the Court referred to evidence showing the consequences of racial discrimination by motels and restaurants on interstate commerce. Congress had relied on compelling anecdotal reports that individual instances of segregation cost thousands to millions of dollars. See Civil Rights — Public Accommodations, Hearings on S. 1732 before the Senate Committee on Commerce, 88th Cong, 1st Sess., App. V, pp. 1383-1387 (1963). Congress also had evidence that the average black family spent substantially less than the average white family in the same income range on public accommodations, and that discrimination accounted for much of the difference. H. R. Rep. No. 88-914, pt. 2, pp. 9-10, and Table II (1963) (Additional Views on H. R. 7152 of Hon. William M. Mc-Culloch, Hon. John V. Lindsay, Hon. William T. Cahill, Hon. Garner E. Shriver, Hon. Clark MacGregor, Hon. Charles McC. Mathias, Hon. James E. Bromwell).

While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964, in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990, see S. Rep. 101-545, at 33, and $5 to $10 billion in 1993, see S. Rep. No. 103-138, at 41.9 Equally important, though, gender-based violence in the 1990’s was shown to operate in a manner similar to raeial *636discrimination in the 1960’s in reducing the mobility of employees and their production and consumption of goods shipped in interstate commerce. Like racial discrimination, “[g]ender-based violence bars its most likely targets— women — from full participation] in the national economy.” Id., at 54.

If the analogy to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not plain enough, one can always look back a bit farther. In Wickard, we upheld the application of the Agricultural Adjustment Act to the planting and consumption of homegrown wheat. The effect on interstate commerce in that ease followed from the possibility that wheat grown at home for personal consumption could either be drawn into the market by rising prices, or relieve its grower of any need to purchase wheat in the market. See 317 U. S., at 127-129. The Commerce Clause predicate was simply the effect of the production of wheat for home consumption on supply and demand in interstate commerce. Supply and demand for goods in interstate commerce will also be affected by the deaths of 2,000 to 4,000 women annually at the hands of domestic abusers, see S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 36, and by the reduction in the work force by the 100,000 or more rape victims who lose their jobs each year or are forced to quit, see id., at 56; H. R. Rep. No. 103-395, at 25-26. Violence against women may be found to affect interstate commerce and affect it substantially.10

*637II

The Act would have passed muster at any time between Wickard in 1942 and Lopez in 1995, a period in which the law enjoyed a stable understanding that congressional power under the Commerce Clause, complemented by the authority of the Necessary and Proper Clause, Art. I, §8, cl. 18, extended to all activity that, when aggregated, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce. As already noted, this understanding was secure even against the turmoil at the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in the aftermath of which the Court not only reaffirmed the cumulative effects and rational basis features of the substantial effects'test, see Heart of Atlanta, supra, at 258; McClung, supra, at 301-305, but declined to limit the commerce power through a formal distinction between legislation focused on “commerce” and statutes addressing “moral and social wrong[s],” Heart of Atlanta, supra, at 257.

The fact that the Act does not pass muster before the Court today is therefore proof, to a degree that Lopez was not, that the Court’s nominal adherence to the substantial effects test is merely that. Although a new jurisprudence has not emerged with any distinctness, it is clear that some congressional conclusions about obviously substantial, cumulative effects on commerce are being assigned lesser values than the once-stable doctrine would assign them. These devaluations are accomplished not by any express repudiation of the substantial effects test or its application through the aggregation of individual conduct, but by supplanting rational basis scrutiny with a new criterion of review.

*638Thus the elusive heart of the majority’s analysis in these cases is its statement that Congress’s findings of fact are “weakened” by the presence of a disfavored “method of reasoning.” Ante, at 615. This seems to suggest that the “substantial effects” analysis is not a factual enquiry, for Congress in the first instance with subsequent judicial review looking only to the rationality of the congressional conclusion, but one of a rather different sort, dependent upon a uniquely judicial competence.

This new characterization of substantial effects has no support in our cases (the self-fulfilling prophecies of Lopez aside), least of all those the majority cites. Perhaps this explains why the majority is not content to rest on its cited precedent but claims a textual justification for moving toward its new system of congressional deference subject to selective discounts. Thus it purports to rely on the sensible and traditional understanding that the listing in the Constitution of some powers implies the exclusion of others unmentioned. See Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 195 (1824); ante, at 610; The Federalist No. 45, p. 313 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (J. Madison).11 The majority stresses that Art. I, §8, enu*639merates the powers of Congress, including the commerce power, an enumeration implying the exclusion of powers not enumerated. It follows, for the majority, not only that there must be some limits to “commerce,” but that some particular subjects arguably within the commerce power can be identified in advance as excluded, on the basis of characteristics other than their commercial effects. Such exclusions come into sight when the activity regulated is not itself commercial or when the States have traditionally addressed it in the exercise of the general police power, conferred under the state constitutions but never extended to Congress under the Constitution of the Nation, see Lopez, 514 U. S., at 566. Ante, at 615-616.

The premise that the enumeration of powers implies that other powers are withheld is sound; the conclusion that some particular categories of subject matter are therefore presumptively beyond the reach of the commerce power is, however, a non sequitur. From the fact that Art. I, § 8, cl. 3, grants an authority limited to regulating commerce, it follows only that Congress may claim no authority under that section to address any subject that does not affect commerce. It does not at all follow that an activity affecting commerce nonetheless falls outside the commerce power, depending on the specific character of the activity, or the authority of a State to regulate it along with Congress.12 My dis*640agreement with the majority is not, however, confined to logic, for history has shown that categorical exclusions have proven as unworkable in practice as they are unsupportable in theory.

A

Obviously, it would not be inconsistent with the text of the Commerce Clause itself to declare “noncommercial” primary activity beyond or presumptively beyond the scope of the commerce power. That variant of categorical approach is not, however, the sole textually permissible way of defining the scope of the Commerce Clause, and any such neat limitation would at least be suspect in the light of the final sentence of Art. I, §8, authorizing Congress to make “all Laws . . . necessary and proper” to give effect to its enumerated powers such as commerce. See United States v. Darby, 312 U. S. 100, 118 (1941) (“The power of Congress . . . extends to those activities intrastate which so affect interstate commerce or the exercise of the power of Congress over it as to make regulation of them appropriate means to the attainment of a legitimate end, the exercise of the granted power of Congress to regulate'interstate commerce”). Accordingly, for significant periods of our history, the Court has defined the commerce power as plenary, unsus-ceptible to categorical exclusions, and this was the view expressed throughout the latter part of the 20th century in the substantial effects test. These two conceptions of the commerce power, plenary and categorically limited, are in fact old rivals, and today’s revival of their competition summons up familiar history, a brief reprise of which may be helpful in posing what I take to be the key question going to the legitimacy of the majority’s decision to breathe new life into the approach of categorical limitation.

*641Chief Justice Marshall’s seminal opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat., at 193-194, construed the commerce power from the start with “a breadth never yet exceeded,” Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S., at 120. In particular, it is worth noting, the Court in Wickard did not regard its holding as exceeding the scope of Chief Justice Marshall’s view of interstate commerce; Wickard applied an aggregate effects test to ostensibly domestic, noncommercial farming consistently with Chief Justice Marshall’s indication that the commerce power may be understood by its exclusion of subjects, among others, “which do not affect other States,” Gibbons, 9 Wheat., at 195. This plenary view of the power has either prevailed or been acknowledged by this Court at every stage of our jurisprudence. See, e.g., id., at 197; Nashville, C. & St. L. R. Co. v. Alabama, 128 U. S. 96, 99-100 (1888); Lottery Case, 188 U. S. 321, 353 (1903); Minnesota Rate Cases, 230 U. S. 352, 398 (1913); United States v. California, 297 U. S. 175, 185 (1936); United States v. Darby, supra, at 115; Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U. S., at 255; Hodel v. Indiana, 452 U. S., at 324. And it was this understanding, free of categorical qualifications, that prevailed in the period after 1937 through Lopez, as summed up by Justice Harlan: “ ‘Of course, the mere fact that Congress has said when particular activity shall be deemed to affect commerce does not preclude further examination by this Court. But where we find that the legislators ... have a rational basis for finding a chosen regulatory scheme necessary to the protection of commerce, our investigation is at an end.’ ” Maryland v. Wirtz, 392 U. S. 183, 190 (1968) (quoting Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U. S., at 303-304).

Justice Harlan spoke with the benefit of hindsight, for he had seen the result of rejecting the plenary view, and today’s attempt to distinguish between primary activities affecting commerce in terms of the relatively commercial or noncommercial character of the primary conduct proscribed comes with the pedigree of near tragedy that I outlined in *642United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S., at 603 (dissenting opinion). In the half century following the modern activation of the commerce power with passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, this Court from time to time created categorical enclaves beyond congressional reach by declaring such activities as “mining,” “production,” “manufacturing,” and union membership to be outside the definition of “commerce” and by limiting application of the effects test to “direct” rather than “indirect” commercial consequences. See, e. g., United States v. E. C. Knight Co., 156 U. S. 1 (1895) (narrowly construing the Sherman Antitrust Act in light of the distinction between “commerce” and “manufacture”); In re Heff, 197 U. S. 488, 505-506 (1905) (stating that Congress could not regulate the intrastate sale of liquor); The Employers’ Liability Cases, 207 U. S. 463, 495-496 (1908) (invalidating law governing tort liability for common carriers operating in interstate commerce because the effects on commerce were indirect); Adair v. United States, 208 U. S. 161 (1908) (holding that labor union membership fell outside “commerce”); Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U. S. 251 (1918) (invalidating law prohibiting interstate shipment of goods manufactured with child labor as a regulation of “manufacture”); A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495, 545-548 (1935) (invalidating regulation of activities that only “indirectly” affected commerce); Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Alton R. Co., 295 U. S. 330, 368-369 (1935) (invalidating pension law for railroad workers on the grounds that conditions of employment were only indirectly linked to commerce); Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 298 U. S. 238, 303-304 (1936) (holding that regulation of unfair labor practices in mining regulated “production,” not “commerce”).

Since adherence to these formalistically contrived confines of commerce power in large measure provoked the judicial crisis of 1937, one might reasonably have doubted that Members of this Court would ever again toy with a return to the days before NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., *643301 U. S. 1 (1937), which brought the earlier and nearly disastrous experiment to an end. And yet today’s decision can only be seen as a step toward recapturing the prior mistakes. Its revival of a distinction between commercial and noncommercial conduct is at odds with Wickard, which repudiated that analysis, and the enquiry into commercial purpose, first intimated by the Lopez concurrence, see Lopez, supra, at 580 (opinion of KENNEDY, J.), is cousin to the intent-based analysis employed in Hammer, supra, at 271-272, but rejected for Commerce Clause purposes in Heart of Atlanta, supra, at 257, and Darby, 312 U. S., at 115.

Why is the majority tempted to reject the lesson so painfully learned in 1937? An answer emerges from contrasting Wickard with one of the predecessor cases it superseded. It was obvious in Wickard that growing wheat for consumption right on the farm was not "commerce” in the common vocabulary,13 but that did not matter constitutionally so long as the aggregated activity of domestic wheat growing affected commerce substantially. Just a few years before *644Wickard, however, it had certainly been no less obvious that “mining” practices could substantially affect commerce, even though Carter Coal Co., swpra, had held mining regulation beyond the national commerce power. When we try to fathom the difference between the two cases, it is clear that they did not go in different directions because the Carter Coal Court could not understand a causal connection that the Wickard Court could grasp; the difference, rather, turned on the fact that the Court in Carter Coal had a reason for trying to maintain its categorical, formalistic distinction, while that reason had been abandoned by the time Wickard was decided. The reason was laissez-faire economics, the point of which was to keep government interference to a minimum. See Lopez, supra, at 605-606 (Souter, J., dissenting). The Court in Carter Coal was still trying to create a laissez-faire world out of the 20th-century economy, and formalistic commercial distinctions were thought to be useful instruments in achieving that object. The Court in Wickard knew it could not do any such thing and in the aftermath of the New Deal had long since stopped attempting the impossible. Without the animating economic theory, there was no point in contriving formalisms in a war with Chief Justice Marshall’s conception of the commerce power.

If we now ask why the formalistic economic/noneconomic distinction might matter today, after its rejection in Wick-ard, the answer is not that the majority fails to see causal connections in an integrated economic world. The answer is that in the minds of the majority there is a new animating theory that makes categorical formalism seem useful again. Just as the old formalism had value in the service of an economic conception, the new one is useful in serving a conception of federalism. It is the instrument by which assertions of national power are to be limited in favor of preserving a supposedly discernible, proper sphere of state autonomy to legislate or refrain from legislating as the in*645dividual States see fit. The legitimacy of the Court’s current emphasis on the noncommercial nature of regulated activity, then, does not turn on any logic serving the text of the Commerce Clause or on the realism of the majority’s view of the national economy. The essential issue is rather the strength of the majority’s claim to have a constitutional warrant for its current conception of a federal relationship enforceable by this Court through limits on otherwise plenary commerce power. This conception is the subject of the majority’s second categorical discount applied today to the facts bearing on the substantial effects test.

B

The Court finds it relevant that the statute addresses conduct traditionally subject to state prohibition under domestic criminal law, a fact said to have some heightened significance when the violent conduct in question is not itself aimed directly at interstate commerce or its instrumentalities. Ante, at 609. Again, history seems to be recycling, for the theory of traditional state concern as grounding a limiting principle has been rejected previously, and more than once. It was disapproved in Darby, 312 U. S., at 123-124, and held insufficient standing alone to limit the commerce power in Hodel, 452 U. S., at 276-277. In the particular context of the Fair Labor Standards Act it was rejected in Maryland v. Wirtz, 392 U. S. 183 (1968), with the recognition that “[tjhere is no general doctrine implied in the Federal Constitution that the two governments, national and state, are each to exercise its powers so as not to interfere with the free and full exercise of the powers of the other.” Id., at 195 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court held it to be “clear that the Federal Government, when acting within a delegated power, may override countervailing state interests, whether these be described as ‘governmental’ or ‘proprietary’ in character.” Ibid. While Wirtz was later overruled by National League of Cities v. Usery, 426 U. S. *646838 (1976), that case was itself repudiated in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528 (1985), which held that the concept of “traditional governmental function” (as an element of the immunity doctrine under Hodel) was incoherent, there being no explanation that would make sense of the multifarious decisions placing some functions on one side of the line, some on the other. 469 U. S., at 546-547. The effort to carve out inviolable state spheres within the spectrum of activities substantially affecting commerce was, of course, just as irreconcilable with Gibbons’s explanation of the national commerce power as being as “absolute] as it would be in a single government,” 9 Wheat., at 197.14

*647The objection to reviving traditional state spheres of action as a consideration in commerce analysis, however, not only rests on the portent of incoherence, but is compounded by a further defect just as fundamental. The defect, in essence, is the majority’s rejection of the Founders’ considered judgment that politics, not judicial review, should mediate between state and national interests as the strength and legislative jurisdiction of the National Government inevitably increased through the expected growth of the national economy.15 Whereas today’s majority takes a leaf from the book of the old judicial economists in saying that the Court should somehow draw the line to keep the federal relationship in a proper balance, Madison, Wilson, and Marshall understood the Constitution very differently.

Although Madison had emphasized the conception of a National Government of discrete powers (a conception that a number of the ratifying conventions thought was too indeterminate to protect civil liberties),16 Madison himself must have sensed the potential scope of some of the powers granted (such as the authority to regulate commerce), for he *648took care in The Federalist No. 46 to hedge his argument for limited power by explaining the importance of national politics in protecting the States’ interests. The National Government “will partake sufficiently of the spirit [of the States], to be disinclined to invade the rights of the individual States, or the prerogatives of their governments.” The Federalist No. 46, p. 319 (J. Cooke ed. 1961). James Wilson likewise noted that “it was a favorite object in the Convention” to secure the sovereignty of the States, and that it had been achieved through the structure of the Federal Government. 2 Elliot’s Debates 438-439.17 The Framers of the Bill of Rights, in turn, may well have sensed that Madison and Wilson were right about politics as the determinant of the federal balance within the broad limits of a power like commerce, for they formulated the Tenth Amendment without any provision comparable to the specific guarantees proposed for individual liberties.18 In any case, this Court recognized the political component of federalism in the seminal Gibbons opinion. After declaring the plenary character of congressional power within the sphere of activity affecting commerce, the Chief Justice spoke for the Court in explaining that there was only one restraint on its valid exercise:

*649“The wisdom and the discretion of Congress, their identity with the people, and the influence which their constituents possess at elections, are, in this, as in many other instances, as that, for example, of declaring war, the sole restraints on which they have relied, to secure them from its abuse. They are the restraints on which the people must often rely solely, in all representative governments.” Gibbons, 9 Wheat., at 197.

Politics as the moderator of the congressional employment of the commerce power was the theme many years later in Wickard, for after the Court acknowledged the breadth of the Gibbons formulation it invoked Chief Justice Marshall yet again in adding that “[h]e made emphatic the embracing and penetrating nature of this power by warning that effective restraints on its exercise must proceed from political rather than judicial processes.” Wickard, 317 U. S., at 120 (citation omitted). Hence, “conflicts of economic interest... are wisely left under our system to resolution by Congress under its more flexible and responsible legislative process. Such conflicts rarely lend themselves to judicial determination. And with the wisdom, workability, or fairness, of the plan of regulation we have nothing to do.” Id., at 129 (footnote omitted).

As- with “conflicts of economic interest,” so with supposed conflicts of sovereign political interests implicated by the Commerce Clause: the Constitution remits them to politics. The point can be put no more clearly than the Court put it the last time it repudiated the notion that some state activities categorically defied the commerce power as understood in accordance with generally accepted concepts. After confirming Madison’s and Wilson’s views with a recitation of the sources of state influence in the structure of the National Constitution, Garcia, 469 U. S., at 560-552, the Court disposed of the possibility of identifying “principled constitutional limitations on the scope of Congress’ Commerce Clause powers over the States merely *650by relying on a priori definitions of state sovereignty,” id., at 548. It concluded that

“the Framers chose to rely on a federal system in which special restraints on federal power over the States inhered principally in the workings of the National Government itself, rather than in discrete limitations on the objects of federal authority. State sovereign interests, then, are more properly protected by procedural safeguards inherent in the structure of the federal system than by judicially created limitations on federal power.” Id., at 552.

The Garcia Court's rejection of “judicially created limitations” in favor of the intended rebanee on national politics was all the more powerful owing to the Court’s explicit recognition that in the centuries since the framing the relative powers of the two sovereign systems have markedly changed. Nationwide economic integration is the norm, the national political power has been augmented by its vast revenues, and the power of the States has been drawn down by the Seventeenth Amendment, eliminating selection of senators by state legislature in favor of direct election.

The Garcia majority recognized that economic growth and the burgeoning of federal revenue have not amended the Constitution, which contains no circuit breaker to preclude the political consequences of these developments. Nor is there any justification for attempts to nullify the natural political impact of the particular amendment that was adopted. The significance for state political power of ending state legislative selection of senators was no secret in 1913, and the amendment was approved despite public comment on that very issue. Representative Franklin Bartlett, after quoting Madison’s Federalist No. 62, as well as remarks by George Mason and John Dickinson during the Constitutional Convention, concluded, “It follows, therefore, that the *651framers of the Constitution, were they present in this House to-day, would inevitably regard this resolution as a most direct blow at the doctrine of State’s rights and at the integrity of the State sovereignties; for if you once deprive a State as a collective organism of all share in the General Government, you annihilate its federative importance.” 26 Cong. Rec. 7774 (1894). Massachusetts Senator George Hoar likewise defended indirect election of the Senate as “a great security for the rights of the States.” S. Doc. No. 232, 59th Cong., 1st Sess., 21 (1906). And Elihu Root warned that if the selection of senators should be taken from state legislatures, “the tide that now sets toward the Federal Government will swell in volume and power.” 46 Cong. Rec. 2243 (1911). “The time will come,” he continued, “when the Government of the United States will be driven to the exercise of more arbitrary and unconsidered power, will be driven to greater concentration, will be driven to extend its functions into the internal affairs of the States.” Ibid. See generally Rossum, The Irony of Constitutional Democracy: Federalism, the Supreme Court, and the Seventeenth Amendment, 36 San Diego L. Rev. 671, 712-714 (1999) (noting federalism-based objections to the Seventeenth Amendment). These warnings did not kill the proposal; the Amendment was ratified, and today it is only the ratification, not the predictions, which this Court can legitimately heed.19

*652Amendments that alter the balance of power between the National and State Governments, like the Fourteenth, or that change the way the States are represented within the Federal Government, like the Seventeenth, are not rips in the fabric of the Framers’ Constitution, inviting judicial repairs. The Seventeenth Amendment may indeed have lessened the enthusiasm of the Senate to represent the States as discrete sovereignties, but the Amendment did not convert the judiciary into an alternate shield against the commerce power.

C

The Court’s choice to invoke considerations of traditional state regulation in these cases is especially odd in light of a distinction recognized in the now-repudiated opinion for the Court in Usery. In explaining that there was no inconsistency between declaring the States immune to the commerce power exercised in the Fair Labor Standards Act, but subject to it under the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, as decided in Fry v. United States, 421 U. S. 542 (1975), the Court spoke of the latter statute as dealing with a serious threat affecting all the political components of the fed*653eral system, “which only collective action by the National Government might forestall.” Usery, 426 U. S., at 853. Today’s majority, however, finds no significance whatever in the state support for the Act based upon the States’ acknowledged failure to deal adequately with gender-based violence in state courts, and the belief of their own law enforcement agencies that national action is essential.20

The National Association of Attorneys General supported the Act unanimously, see Violence Against Women: Victims of the System, Hearing on S. 15 before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 102d Cong., 1st Sess., 37-38 (1991), and Attorneys General from 38 States urged Congress to enact the Civil Rights Remedy, representing that “the current system for dealing with violence against women is inadequate,” see Crimes of Violence Motivated by Gender, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong., 1st Sess., 34-36 (1993). It was against this record of failure at the state level that the Act was passed to provide the choice of a federal forum in place of the state-court systems found inadequate to stop gender-biased violence. See Women and Violence, Hearing before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 101st Cong., 2d Sess., 2 (1990) (statement of Sen. Biden) (noting importance of federal forum).21 The Act accordingly offers a federal civil rights remedy aimed exactly *654at violence against women, as an alternative to the generic state tort causes of action found to be poor tools of action by the state task forces. See S. Rep. No. 101-545, at 45 (noting difficulty of fitting gender-motivated crimes into common-law categories). As the 1993 Senate Report put it, “The Violence Against Women Act is intended to respond both to the underlying attitude that this violence is somehow less serious than other crime and to the resulting- failure of our criminal justice system to address such violence. Its goals are both symbolic and practical. . ..” S. Rep. No. 103-138, at 38.

The collective opinion of state officials that the Act was needed continues virtually unchanged, and when the Civil Rights Remedy was challenged in court, the States came to its defense. Thirty-six of them and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico have filed an amicus brief in support of petitioners in these cases, and only one State has taken respondents’ side. It is, then, not the least irony of these cases that the States will be forced to enjoy the new federalism whether they want it or not. For with the Court’s decision today, Antonio Morrison, like Carter Coal’s James Carter before him, has “won the states’ rights plea against the states themselves.” R. Jackson, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy 160 (1941).

HI

All of this convinces me that today’s ebb of the commerce power rests on error, and at the same time leads me to doubt that the majority’s view will prove to be enduring law. There is yet one more reason for doubt. Although we sense the presence of Carter Coal, Schechter, and Usery once again, the majority embraces them only at arm’s-length. Where such decisions once stood for rules, today’s opinion points to considerations by which substantial effects are discounted. Cases- standing for the sufficiency of substantial effects are not overruled; cases overruled since 1937 are not quite revived. The Court’s thinking betokens less clearly *655a return to the conceptual strait jackets of Schechter and Garter Coal and Usery than to something like the unsteady state of obscenity law between Redrup v. New York, 386 U. S. 767 (1967) (per curiam), and Miller v. California, 413 U. S. 15 (1973), a period in which the failure to provide a workable definition left this Court to review each case ad hoc. See id., at 22, n. 3; Interstate Circuit, Inc. v. Dallas, 390 U. S. 676, 706-708 (1968) (Harlan, J., dissenting). As our predecessors learned then, the practice of such ad hoc review cannot preserve the distinction between the judicial and the legislative, and this Court, in any event, lacks the institutional capacity to maintain such a regime for very long. This one will end when the majority realizes that the conception of the commerce power for which it entertains hopes would inevitably fail the test expressed in Justice Holmes’s statement that “[t]he first call of a theory of law is that it should fit the facts.” O. Holmes, The Common Law 167 (Howe ed. 1963). The facts that cannot be ignored today are the facts of integrated national commerce and a political relationship between States and Nation much affected by their respective treasuries and constitutional modifications adopted by the people. The federalism of some earlier time is no more adequate to account for those facts today than the theory of laissez-faire was able to govern the national economy 70 years ago.

1

Finding the law a valid exercise of Commerce Clause power, I have no occasion to reach the question whether it might also be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.

2

It is true that these data relate to the effects of violence against women generally, while the civil rights remedy limits its scope to “crimes of violence motivated by gender” — presumably a somewhat narrower subset of acts. See 42 U. S. C. § 13981(b). But the meaning of “motivated by gender” has not been elucidated by lower courts, much less by this one, so the degree to which the findings rely on acts not redressable by the civil rights remedy is unclear. As will appear, however, much of the data seems to indicate behavior with just such motivation. In any event, adopting a cramped reading of the statutory text, and thereby increasing the constitutional difficulties, would directly contradict one of the most basic canons of statutory interpretation. See NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U. S. 1, 30 (1937). Having identified the problem of violence against women, Congress may address what it sees as the most threatening manifestation; “reform may take one step at a time.” Williamson v. Lee Optical of Okla., Inc., 348 U. S. 483, 489 (1955)3

3

See, 6. g., Domestic Violence: Terrorism in the Home, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs and Alcoholism of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, 101st Cong., 2d Sess. (1990); Women and Violence, Hearing before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 101st Cong., 2d Sess. (1990); Violence Against Women: Victims of the System, Hearing on S. 15 before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 102d Cong., 1st Sess. (1991) (S. Hearing 102-369); Violence Against Women, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 102d Cong., 2d Sess. (1992); Hearing on Domestic Violence, Hearing before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong., 1st Sess. (1993); Violent Crimes Against Women, Hearing before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong., 1st Sess. (1993); Violence Against Women: Fighting the Fear, Hearing before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong, 1st Sess. (1993) (S. Hearing 103-878); Crimes of Violence Motivated by Gender, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong, 1st Sess. (1993); Domestic Violence: Not Just a Family Matter, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong., 2d Sess. (1994).

4

See, e. g., S. Hearing 103-596, at 1-4 (testimony of Northeastern Univ. Law School Professor Clare Dalton); S. Hearing 102-369, at 103-105 (testimony of Univ. of Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein); S. Hearing 103-878, *630at 7-11 (testimony of American Medical Assn, president-elect Robert McAfee).

5

See, e. g., id., at 13-17 (testimony of Lisa); id., at 40-42 (testimony of Jennifer Tescher).

6

See, e.g., S. Hearing 102-369, at 24-36, 71-87 (testimony of attorneys general of Iowa and Illinois); id., at 235-245 (testimony of National Federation of Business and Professional Women); S. Hearing No. 103-596, at Í5-17 (statement of James Hardeman, Manager, Counseling Dept., Polaroid Corp.).

7

See Judicial Council of California Advisory Committee on Gender Bias in the Courts, Achieving Equal Justice for Women and Men in the California Courts (July 1996) (edited version of 1990 report); Colorado Supreme Court Task Force on Gender Bias in the Courts, Gender and Justice in the Colorado Courts (1990); Connecticut Task Force on Gender, Justice and the Courts, Report to the Chief Justice (Sept. 1991); Report of the Florida Supreme Court Gender Bias Study Commission (Mar. 1990); Supreme Court of Georgia, Commission on Gender Bias in the Judicial System, Gender and Justice in the Courts (1991), reprinted in 8 Ga. St. U. L. Rev. 539 (1992); Report of the Illinois Task Force on Gender Bias in the Courts (1990); Equality in the Courts Task Force, State of Iowa, Final Report (Feb. 1993); Kentucky Task Force on Gender Fairness in the Courts, Equal Justice for Women and Men (Jan. 1992); Louisiana Task Force on Women in the Courts, Final Report (1992); Maryland Special Joint Comm., Gender Bias in the Courts (May 1989); Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Gender Bias Study of the Court System in Massachusetts (1989); Michigan Supreme Court Task Force on Gender Issues in the Courts, Final Report (Dec. 1989); Minnesota Supreme Court Task Force for Gender Fairness in the Courts, Final Report (1989), reprinted in 15 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 825 (1989); Nevada Supreme Court Gender Bias Task Force, Justice for Women (1988); New Jersey Supreme Court Task Force on Women in the Courts, Report of the First Year (June 1984); Report of the New York Task Force on Women in the Courts (Mar. 1986); Final Report of the Rhode Island Supreme Court Committee on Women in the Courts (June 1987); Utah Task Force on Gender and Justice, Report to the Utah Judicial Council (Mar. 1990); Vermont Supreme Court and Vermont Bar Assn., Gender and Justice: Report of the Vermont Task Force on Gender Bias in the Legal System (Jan. 1991); Washington State Task Force on Gender and Justice *631in the Courts, Final Report (1989); Wisconsin Equal Justice Task Force, Final Report (Jan. 1991).

8

See S. Rep. No. 101-545 (1990); Majority Staff of Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Violence Against Women: The Increase of Rape in America, 102d Cong., 1st Sess. (Comm. Print 1991); S. Rep. No. 102-197 (1991); Majority Staff of Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Violence Against Women: A Week in the Life of America, 102d Cong., 2d Sess. (Comm. Print 1992); S. Rep. No. 103-138 (1993); Majority Staff of Senate Committee on the Judiciary, The Response to Rape: Detours on the Road to Equal Justice, 103d Cong., 1st Sess. (Comm. Print 1993); H. R. Rep. No. 103-395 (1993); H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 103-711 (1994).

9

In other cases, we have accepted dramatically smaller figures. See, e. g., Hodel v. Indiana, 452 U. S. 314, 325, n. 11 (1981) (stating that corn production with a value of $5.16. million “surely is not an insignificant amount of commerce”).

10

It should go without saying that my view of the limit of the congressional commerce power carries no implication about the wisdom of exercising it to the limit. I and other Members of this Court appearing before Congress have repeatedly argued against the federalization of traditional state crimes and the extension of federal remedies to problems for which the States have historically taken responsibility and may deal with today if they have the will to do so. See Hearings before a Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, 104th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 7, pp. 13-14 (1995) (testimony of Justice Kennedy); Hearings on H. R. 4603 before a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, 103d Cong., 2d Sess., 100-107 (1994) (testimony of Justices *637Kennedy and Sotjter). The Judicial Conference of the United States originally opposed the Aet, though after the original bill was amended to include the gender-based animus requirement, the objection was withdrawn for reasons that are not apparent. See Crimes of Violence Motivated by Gender, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong., 1st Sess., 70-71 (1993).

11

The claim that powers not granted were withheld was the chief Federalist argument against the necessity of a bill of rights. Bills of rights, Hamilton claimed, “have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain every thing, they have no need of particular reservations.” The Federalist No. 84, at 578. James Wilson went further in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention, asserting that an enumeration of rights was positively dangerous because it suggested, conversely, that every right not reserved was surrendered. See 2 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution 436-437 (2d ed. 1863) (hereinafter Elliot’s Debates). The Federalists did not, of course, prevail on this point; most States voted for the Constitution only after proposing amendments and the First Congress speedily adopted a Bill of Rights. See Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 569 (1985) (Powell, J., dissenting). While that document protected a range of specific individual *639rights against federal infringement, it did not, with the possible exception of the Second Amendment, offer any similarly specific protections to areas of state sovereignty.

12

To the contrary, we have always recognized that while the federal commerce power may overlap the reserved state police power, in such eases federal authority is supreme. See, e. g., Lake Shore & Michigan Southern R. Co. v. Ohio, 178 U. S. 285, 297-298 (1899) (“When Congress acts with reference to a matter confided to it by the Constitution, then its statutes displace all conflicting local regulations touching that matter, although such regulations may have been established in pursuance of a power not surrendered by the States to the General Government”); United States v. California, 297 U. S. 175, 185 (1936) (“[W]e look to the activities *640in which the states have traditionally engaged as marking the boundary of the restriction upon the federal taxing power. But there is no such limitation upon the plenary power to regulate commerce”).

13

Contrary to the Court’s suggestion, ante, at 611, n. 4, Wickard v. Fil-burn, 317 U. S. 111 (1942), applied the substantial effects test to domestic agricultural production for domestic consumption, an activity that cannot fairly be described as commercial, despite its commercial consequences in affecting or being affected by the demand for agricultural products in the commercial market. The Wickard Court admitted that Filburn’s activity “may not be regarded as commerce” but insisted that “it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce ...Id., at 125. The characterization of home wheat production as “commerce” or not is, however, ultimately beside the point. For if substantial effects on commerce are proper subjects of concern under the Commerce Clause, what difference should it make whether the causes of those effects are themselves commercial? Cf., e. g., National Organization for Women, Inc. v. Scheidler, 510 U. S. 249, 258 (1994) (“An enterprise surely can have a detrimental influence on interstate or foreign commerce without having its own profit-seeking motives”). The Court’s answer is that it makes a difference to federalism, and the legitimacy of the Court’s new judicially derived federalism is the crux of our disagreement. See infra, at 644-646.

14

The Constitution of 1787 did, in fact, forbid some exercises of the commerce power. Article I, § 9, cl. 6, barred Congress from giving preference to the ports of one State over those of another. More strikingly, the Framers protected the slave trade from federal interference, see Art. I, §9, el. 1, and confirmed the power of a State to guarantee the chattel status of slaves who fled to another State, see Art. IV, § 2, cl. 3. These reservations demonstrate the plenary nature of the federal power; the exceptions prove the rule. Apart from them, proposals to carve islands of state authority out of the stream of commerce power were entirely unsuccessful. Roger Sherman's proposed definition of federal legislative power as excluding “matters of internal police” met Gouver-neur Morris’s response that “[t]he internal police . . . ought to be infringed in many cases” and was voted down eight to two. 2 Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, pp. 25-26 (M. Farrand ed. 1911) (hereinafter Farrand). The Convention similarly rejected Sherman's attempt to include in Article V a proviso that “no state shall... be affected in its internal police.” 5 Elliot’s Debates 551-552. Finally, Rufus King suggested an explicit bill of rights for the States, a device that might indeed have set aside the areas the Court now declares off-limits. 1 Farrand 493 (“As the fundamental rights of individuals are secured by express provisions in the State Constitutions; why may not a like security be provided for the Rights of States in the National Constitution”). That proposal, too, came to naught. In short, to suppose that enumerated powers must have limits is sensible; to maintain that there exist judicially identifiable areas of state regulation immune to the plenary congressional commerce *647power even though falling within the limits defined by the substantial effects test is to deny our constitutional history.

15

That the national economy and the national legislative power expand in tandem is not a recent discovery. This Court accepted the prospect well over 100 years ago, noting that the commerce powers “are not confined to the instrumentalities of commerce, or the postal service known or in use when the Constitution was adopted, but they keep pace with the progress of the country, and adapt themselves to the new developments of time and circumstances.” Pensacola Telegraph Co. v. Western Union Telegraph Co., 96 U. S. 1, 9 (1878). See also, e. g., Farmers Loan & Trust Co. v. Minnesota, 280 U. S. 204, 211-212 (1930) (“Primitive conditions have passed; business is now transacted on a national scale”).

16

As mentioned in n. 11, supra, many state conventions voted in favor of the Constitution only after proposing amendments. See 1 Elliot’s Debates 822-323 (Massachusetts), 325 (South Carolina), 325-327 (New Hampshire), 327 (Virginia), 327-331 (New York), 331-332 (North Carolina), 334-337 (Rhode Island).

17

Statements to similar effect pervade the ratification debates. See, e. g., 2 id., at 166-170 (Massachusetts, remarks of Samuel Stillman); 2 id., at 251-258 (New York, remarks of Alexander Hamilton); 4 id., at 95-98 (North Carolina, remarks of James Iredell).

18

The majority’s special solicitude for “areas of traditional state regulation,” ante, at 615, is thus founded not on the text of the Constitution but on what has been termed the “spirit of the Tenth Amendment,” Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S., at 585 (O’Connor, J., dissenting) (emphasis in original). Susceptibility to what Justice Holmes more bluntly called “some invisible radiation from the general terms of the Tenth Amendment,” Missouri v. Holland, 252 U. S. 416, 434 (1920), has increased in recent years, in disregard of his admonition that “[w]e must consider what this country has become in deciding what that Amendment has reserved,” ibid.

19

The majority tries to deflect the objection that it blocks an intended political process by explaining that the Framers intended politics to set the federal balance only within the sphere of permissible commerce legislation, whereas we are looking to politics to define that sphere (in derogation even of Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803)), ante, at 616. But we all accept the view that politics is the arbiter of state interests only within the realm of legitimate congressional action under the commerce power. Neither Madison nor Wilson nor Marshall, nor the Jones & Laughlin, Darby, Wickard, or Garcia Courts, suggested that politics defines the commerce power. Nor do we, even though we recognize that the conditions of the contemporary world result in a vastly greater sphere *652of influence for politics than the Framers would have envisioned. Polities has legitimate authority, for all of us on both sides of the disagreement, only within the legitimate compass of the commerce power. The majority claims merely to be engaging in the judicial task of patrolling the outer boundaries of that congressional authority. See ante, at 616-617, n. 7. That assertion cannot be reconciled with our statements of the substantial effects test, which have not drawn the categorical distinctions the majority favors. See, e. g., Wickard, 317 U. S., at 125; United States v. Darby, 312 U. S. 100, 118-119 (1941). The majority’s attempt to circumscribe the commerce power by defining it in terms of categorical exceptions can only be seen as a revival of similar efforts that led to near tragedy for the Court and incoherence for the law. If history’s lessons are accepted as guides for Commerce Clause interpretation today, as we do accept them, then the subject matter of the Act falls within the commerce power and the choice to legislate nationally on that subject, or to except it from national legislation because the States have traditionally dealt with it, should be a political choice and only a political choice.

20

See n. 7, supra. The point here is not that I take the position that the States are incapable of dealing adequately with domestic violence if their political leaders have the will to do so; it is simply that the Congress had evidence from which it could find a national statute necessary, so that its passage obviously survives Commerce Clause scrutiny.

21

The majority’s concerns about accountability strike me as entirely misplaced. Individuals, such as the defendants in this action, haled into federal court and sued under the United States Code, are quite aware of which of our dual sovereignties is attempting to regulate their behavior. Had Congress chosen, in the exercise of its powers under §5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to proceed instead by regulating the States, rather than private individuals, this accountability would be far less plain.

Justice Breyer,

with whom Justice Stevens joins, and with whom Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg join as to Part I-A, dissenting.

No one denies the importance of the Constitution’s federalist principles. Its state/federal division of authority protects liberty — both by restricting the burdens that government can impose from a distance and by facilitating citizen participation in government that is closer to home. The question is how the judiciary can best implement that *656original federalist understanding where the Commerce Clause is at issue.

I

The majority holds that the federal commerce power does not extend to such “noneconomic” activities as “non-economic, violent criminal conduct” that significantly affects interstate commerce only if we “aggregate” the interstate “effect[sj” of individual instances. Ante, at 617. Justice Souter explains why history, precedent, and legal logic militate against the majority’s approach. I agree and join his opinion. I add that the majority’s holding illustrates the difficulty of finding a workable judicial Commerce Clause touchstone — a set of comprehensible interpretive rules that courts might use to impose some meaningful limit, but not too great a limit, upon the scope of the legislative authority that the Commerce Clause delegates to Congress.

A

Consider the problems. The “economic/noneconomic” distinction is not easy to apply. Does the local street corner mugger engage in “economic” activity or “noneconomic” activity when he mugs for money? See Perez v. United States, 402 U. S. 146 (1971) (aggregating local “loan sharking” instances); United States v. Lopez, 514 U. S. 549, 559 (1995) (loan sharking is economic because it consists of “intrastate extortionate credit transactions”); ante, at 610. Would evidence that desire for economic domination underlies many brutal crimes against women save the present statute? See United States General Accounting Office, Health, Education, and Human Services Division, Domestic Violence: Prevalence and Implications for Employment Among Welfare Recipients 7-8 (Nov. 1998); Brief for Equal Rights Advocates et al. as Amicus Curiae 10-12.

The line becomes yet harder to draw given the need for exceptions. The Court itself would permit Congress to aggregate, hence regulate, “noneconomic” activity taking place *657at economic establishments. See Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U. S. 241 (1964) (upholding civil rights laws forbidding discrimination at local motels); Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U. S. 294 (1964) (same for restaurants); Lopez, supra, at 559 (recognizing congressional power to aggregate, hence forbid, noneconomically motivated discrimination at public accommodations); ante, at 610 (same). And it would permit Congress to regulate where that regulation is “an essential part of a larger regulation of economic activity, in which the regulatory scheme could be undercut unless the intrastate activity were regulated.” Lopez, supra, at 561; cf. Controlled Substances Act, 21 U. S. C. § 801 et seq. (regulating drugs produced for home consumption). Given the former exception, can Congress simply rewrite the present law and limit its application to restaurants, hotels, perhaps universities, and other places of public accommodation? Given the latter exception, can Congress save the present law by including it, or much of it, in a broader “Safe Transport” or “Workplace Safety” act?

More important, why should we give critical constitutional importance to the economic, or noneconomic, nature of an interstate-commerce-affecting cause? If chemical emanations through indirect environmental change cause identical, severe commercial harm outside a State, why should it matter whether local factories or home fireplaces release them? The Constitution itself refers only to Congress’ power to “regulate Commerce . . . among the several States,” and to make laws “necessary and proper” to implement that power. Art. I, § 8, els. 3,18. The language says nothing about either the local nature, or the economic nature, of an interstate-commerce-affecting cause.

This Court has long held that only the interstate commercial effects, not the local nature of the cause, are constitutionally relevant. See NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U. S. 1, 38-39 (1937) (focusing upon interstate effects); Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S. 111, 125 (1942) (aggregating *658interstate effects of wheat grown for home consumption); Heart of Atlanta Motel, supra, at 258 (‘“[I]f it is interstate commerce that feels the pinch, it does not matter how local the operation which applies the squeeze'” (quoting United States v. Women’s Sportswear Mfrs. Assn., 836 U. S. 460, 464 (1949))). Nothing in the Constitution’s language, or that of earlier cases prior to Lopez, explains why the Court should ignore one highly relevant characteristic of an interstate-commerce-affecting cause (how “local” it is), while placing critical constitutional weight upon a different, less obviously relevant, feature (how “economic” it is).

Most importantly, the Court’s complex rules seem unlikely to help secure the very object that they seek, namely, the protection of “areas of traditional state regulation” from federal intrusion. Ante, at 615. The Court’s rules, even if broadly interpreted, are underinclusive. The local pickpocket is no less a traditional subject of state regulation than is the local gender-motivated assault. Regardless, the Court reaffirms, as it should, Congress’ well-established and frequently exercised power to enact laws that satisfy a commerce-related jurisdictional prerequisite — for example, that some item relevant to the federally regulated activity has at some time crossed a state line. Ante, at 609, 611-612, 613, and n. 5; Lopez, supra, at 558; Heart of Atlanta Motel, supra, at 256 (“‘[Tjhe authority of Congress to keep the channels of interstate commerce free from immoral and injurious uses has been frequently sustained, and is no longer open to question’” (quoting Caminetti v. United States, 242 U. S. 470, 491 (1917))); see also United States v. Bass, 404 U. S. 336, 347-350 (1971) (saving ambiguous felon-in-possession statute by requiring gun to have crossed state line); Scarborough v. United States, 431 U. S. 563, 575 (1977) (interpreting same statute to require only that gun passed “in interstate commerce” “at some time,” without questioning constitutionality); cf., e. g., 18 U. S. C. § 2261(a)(1) (making it a federal crime for a person to cross state lines to commit *659a crime of violence against a spouse or intimate partner); § 1951(a) (federal crime to commit robbery, extortion, physical violence or threat thereof, where “article or commodity in commerce” is affected, obstructed, or delayed); §2815 (making unlawful the knowing receipt or possession of certain stolen items that have “crossed a State . . . boundary”); § 922(g)(1) (prohibiting felons from shipping, transporting, receiving, or possessing firearms “in interstate... commerce”).

And in a world where most everyday products or their component parts cross interstate boundaries, Congress will frequently find it possible to redraft a statute using language that ties the regulation to the interstate movement of some relevant object, thereby regulating local criminal activity or, for that matter, family affairs. See, e. g., Child Support Recovery Act of 1992,18 U. S. C. §228. Although this possibility does not give the Federal Government the power to regulate everything, it means that any substantive limitation will apply randomly in terms of the interests the majority seeks to protect. How much would be gained, for example, were Congress to reenact the present law in the form of “An Act Forbidding Violence Against Women Perpetrated at Public Accommodations or by Those Who Have Moved in, or through the Use of Items that Have Moved in, Interstate Commerce”?' Complex Commerce Clause rules creating fine distinctions that achieve only random results do little to further the important federalist interests that called them into being. That is why modern (pre-Lopez) case law rejected them. See Wickard, supra, at 120; United States v. Darby, 312 U. S. 100, 116-117 (1941); Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., supra, at 37.

The majority, aware of these difficulties, is nonetheless concerned with what it sees as an important contrary consideration. To determine the lawfulness of statutes simply by asking whether Congress could reasonably have found that aggregated local instances significantly affect interstate commerce will allow Congress to regulate almost anything. *660Virtually all local activity, when instances are aggregated, can have "substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption.” Hence Congress could “regulate any crime,” and perhaps “marriage, divorce, and child-rearing” as well, obliterating the “Constitution’s distinction between national and local authority.” Ante, at 615, 616; Lopez, 514 U. S., at 558; cf. A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495, 548 (1935) (need for distinction between “direct” and “indirect” effects lest there “be virtually no limit to the federal power”); Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U. S. 251, 276 (1918) (similar observation).

This consideration, however, while serious, does not reflect a jurisprudential defect, so much as it reflects a practical reality. We live in a Nation knit together by two centuries of scientific, technological, commercial, and environmental change. Those changes, taken together, mean that virtually every kind of activity, no matter how local, genuinely can affect commerce, or its conditions, outside the State — at least when considered in the aggregate. Heart of Atlanta Motel, 379 U. S., at 251. And that fact makes it close to impossible for courts to develop meaningful subject-matter categories that would exclude some kinds of local activities from ordinary Commerce Clause “aggregation” rules without, at the same time, depriving Congress of the power to regulate activities that have a genuine and important effect upon interstate commerce.

Since judges cannot change the world, the “defect” means that, within the bounds of the rational, Congress, not the courts, must remain primarily responsible for striking the appropriate state/federal balance. Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 552 (1985); ante, at 645-649 (Souter, J., dissenting); Kimel v. Florida Bd. of Regents, 528 U. S. 62, 93-94 (2000) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (Framers designed important structural safeguards to ensure that, when Congress legislates, “the normal operation of the legislative process itself would adequately defend *661state interests from undue infringement”); see also Kramer, Putting the Politics Back into the Political Safeguards of Federalism, 100 Colum. L. Rev. 215 (2000) (focusing on role of political process and political parties in protecting state interests). Congress is institutionally motivated to do so. Its Members represent state and local district interests. They consider the views of state and local officials when they legislate, and they have even developed formal procedures to ensure that such consideration takes place. See, e. g., Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995, Pub. L. 104-4, 109 Stat. 48 (codified in scattered sections of 2 U. S. C.). Moreover, Congress often can better reflect state concerns for autonomy in the details of sophisticated statutory schemes than can the Judiciary, which cannot easily gather the relevant facts and which must apply more general legal rules and categories. See, e. g., 42 U. S. C. § 7543(b) (Clean Air Act); 33 U. S. C. § 1251 et seq. (Clean Water Act); see also New York v. United States, 505 U. S. 144, 167-168 (1992) (collecting other examples of “cooperative federalism”). Not' surprisingly, the bulk of American law is still state law, and overwhelmingly so.

B

I would also note that Congress, when it enacted the statute, followed procedures that help to protect the federalism values at stake. It provided adequate notice to the States of its intent to legislate in an “are[a] of traditional state regulation.” Ante, at 615. And in response, attorneys general in the overwhelming majority of States (38) supported congressional legislation, telling Congress that “[o]ur experience as Attorneys General strengthens our belief that the problem of violence against women is a national one, requiring federal attention, federal leadership, and federal funds.” Crimes of Violence Motivated by Gender, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong., 1st Sess., 34-86 (1993); see also Violence Against Women: Victims of *662the System, Hearing on S. 15 before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 102d Cong., 1st Sess., 37-38 (1991) (unanimous resolution of the National Association of Attorneys General); but cf. Crimes of Violence Motivated by Gender, supra, at 77-84 (Conference of Chief Justices opposing legislation).

Moreover, as Justice Souter has pointed out, Congress compiled a “mountain of data” explicitly documenting the interstate commercial effects of gender-motivated crimes of violence. Ante, at 628-635, 653-654 (dissenting opinion). After considering alternatives, it focused the federal law upon documented deficiencies in state legal systems. And it tailored the law to prevent its use in certain areas of traditional state concern, such as divorce, alimony, or child custody. 42 U. S. C. § 13981(e)(4). Consequently, the law before us seems to represent an instance, not of state/federal conflict, but of state/federal efforts to cooperate in order to help solve a mutually acknowledged national problem. Cf. §§ SOOw-lQ, 3796gg, 3796hh, 10409, 13931 (providing federal moneys to encourage state and local initiatives to combat gender-motivated violence).

I call attention to the legislative process leading up to enactment of this statute because, as the majority recognizes, ante, at 614, it far surpasses that which led to the enactment of the statute we considered in Lopez. And even were I to accept Lopez as an accurate statement of the law, which I do not, that distinction provides a possible basis for upholding the law here. This Court on occasion has pointed to the importance of procedural limitations in keeping the power of Congress in check. See Garcia, supra, at 554 (“Any substantive restraint on the exercise of Commerce Clause powers must find its justification in the procedural nature of this basic limitation, and it must be tailored to compensate for possiblé failings in the national political process rather than to dictate a ‘sacred province of state autonomy’ ” (quoting EEOC v. Wyoming, 460 U. S. 226, 236 (1983))); see *663also Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U. S. 452, 460-461 (1991) (insisting upon a “plain statement” of congressional intent when Congress legislates “in areas traditionally regulated by the States”); cf. Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 426 U. S. 88, 103-105, 114-117 (1976); Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U. S. 448, 548-554 (1980) (Stevens, J., dissenting).

Commentators also have suggested that the thoroughness of legislative procedures — e.g., whether Congress took a “hard look” — might sometimes make a determinative difference in a Commerce Clause case, say, when Congress legislates in an area of traditional state regulation. See, e. g., Jackson, Federalism and the Uses and Limits of Law: Printz and Principle?, 111 Harv. L. Rev. 2180, 2231-2245 (1998); Gardbaum, Rethinking Constitutional Federalism, 74 Texas L. Rev. 795, 812-828, 830-832 (1996); Lessig, Translating Federalism: United States v. Lopez, 1995 S. Ct. Rev. 125, 194-214 (1995); see also Treaty Establishing the European Community Art. 5; Bermann, Taking Subsidiarity Seriously: Federalism in the European Community and the United States, 94 Colum. L. Rev. 331, 378-403 (1994) (arguing for similar limitation in respect to somewhat analogous principle of subsidiarity for European Community); Gardbaum, supra, at 833-837 (applying subsidiarity principles to American federalism). Of course, any judicial insistence that Congress follow particular procedures might itself intrude upon congressional prerogatives and embody difficult definitional problems. But the intrusion, problems, and consequences all would seem less serious than those embodied in the majority’s approach. See supra, at 656-659.

I continue to agree with Justice Souter that the Court’s traditional “rational basis” approach is sufficient. Ante, at 628 (dissenting opinion); see also Lopez, 514 U. S., at 603-615 (Souter, J., dissenting); id., at 615-631 (Breyer, J., dissenting). But I recognize that the law in this area is unstable and that time and experience may demonstrate both the unworkability of the majority’s rules and the superiority *664of Congress’ own procedural approach — in which case the law may evolve toward a rule that, in certain difficult Commerce Clause cases, takes account of the thoroughness with which Congress has considered the federalism issue.

For these reasons, as well as those set forth by Justice Souter, this statute falls well within Congress’ Commerce Clause authority, and I dissent from the Court’s contrary conclusion.

II

Given my conclusion on the Commerce Clause question, I need not consider Congress’ authority under §5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nonetheless, I doubt the Court’s reasoning rejecting that source of authority. The Court points out that in United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629 (1883), and the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3 (1883), the Court held that §5 does not authorize Congress to use the Fourteenth Amendment as a source of power to remedy the conduct of private persons. Ante, at 621-622. That is certainly so. The Federal Government’s argument, however, is that Congress used § 5 to remedy the actions of state actors, namely, those States which, through discriminatory design or the discriminatory conduct of their officials, failed to provide adequate (or any) state remedies for women injured by gender-motivated violence — a failure that the States, and Congress, documented in depth. . See ante, at 630-631, n. 7, 653-654 (Souter, J., dissenting) (collecting sources).

Neither Harris nor the Civil Rights Cases considered this kind of claim. The Court in Harris specifically said that it treated the federal laws in question as “directed exclusively against the action of private persons, without reference to the laws of the State or their administration by her officers.” 106 U. S., at 640 (emphasis added); see also Civil Rights Cases, supra, at 14 (observing that the statute did “not profess to be corrective of any constitutional wrong committed by the States” and that it established “rules for the conduct *665of individuals in society towards each other,... without referring in any manner to any supposed action of the State or its authorities”).

The Court responds directly to the relevant “state actor” claim by finding that the present law lacks “ ‘congruence and proportionality’ ” to the state discrimination that it purports to remedy. Ante, at 625-626; see City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U. S. 507, 526 (1997). That is because the law, unlike federal laws prohibiting literacy tests for voting, imposing voting rights requirements, or punishing state officials who intentionally discriminated in jury selection, Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U. S. 641 (1966); South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301 (1966); Ex parte Virginia, 100 U. S. 339 (1880), is not “directed ... at any State or state actor.” Ante, at 626.

But why can Congress not provide a remedy against private actors? Those private actors, of course, did not themselves violate the Constitution. But this Court has held that Congress at least sometimes can enact remedial “[legislation . . . [that] prohibits conduct which is not itself unconstitutional.” Flores, supra, at 518; see also Katzenbach v. Morgan, supra, at 651; South Carolina v. Katzenbach, supra, at 308. The statutory remedy does not in any sense purport to “determine what constitutes a constitutional violation.” Flores, supra, at 519. It intrudes little upon either States or private parties. It may lead state actors to improve their own remedial systems, primarily through example. It restricts private actors only by imposing liability for private conduct that is, in the main, already forbidden by state law. Why is the remedy “disproportionate”? And given the relation between remedy and violation — the creation of a federal remedy to substitute for constitutionally inadequate state remedies — where is the lack of “congruence”?

The majority adds that Congress found that the problem of inadequacy of state remedies “does not exist in all States, *666or even most States.” Ante, at 626. But Congress had before it the task force reports of at least 21 States documenting constitutional violations. And it made its own findings about pervasive gender-based stereotypes hampering many state legal systems, sometimes unconstitutionally so. See, e. g., S. Rep. . No. 103-138, pp. 38, 41-42, 44-47 (1993); S. Rep. No. 102-197, pp. 39, 44-49 (1991); H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 103-711, p. 385 (1994). The record nowhere reveals a congressional finding that the problem “does not exist” elsewhere. Why can Congress not take the evidence before it as evidence of a national problem? This Court has not previously held that Congress must document the existence of a problem in every State prior to proposing a national solution. And the deference this Court gives to Congress’ chosen remedy under § 5, Flores, supra, at 536, suggests that any such requirement would be inappropriate.

Despite my doubts about the majority’s §5 reasoning, I need not, and do not, answer the §5 question, which I would leave for more thorough analysis if necessary on another occasion. Rather, in my view, the Commerce Clause provides an adequate basis for the statute before us. And I would uphold its constitutionality as the “necessary and proper” exercise of legislative power granted to Congress by that Clause.