Abstract: The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was Congress’s fourth attempt since 1957 to enforce the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment. All prior attempts sought solutions through the judicial system and failed. This was because, as Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach explained during his Senate testimony in 1965, no matter what the courts decided, recalcitrant states found a way around it. “What is required,” Katzenbach told the House subcommittee, “is a systematic, automatic method to deal with discriminatory tests, with discriminatory testers, and with discriminatory threats.” The challenge was to design a systematic approach that stayed a step ahead of the discriminators. The VRA was the solution to this challenge. This chapter tells the story of the drafting of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA is rightly lauded as one of the most effective and significant civil rights statutes enacted by Congress. The Act is also understood as a radical intervention into matters that the U.S. Constitution leaves to the states. This chapter offers three arguments. First, that rather than a radical intervention, the Voting Rights Act was a conservative solution. Second, that the Supreme Court’s understanding of racism as “pathological racism” anchored its voting rights jurisprudence. It justified the Court’s approach to federalism, state sovereignty, sectionalism, and the Act’s disparate treatment of the states. Third, and finally, once the consensus over pathological racism weakened, the VRA came under threat. This explains Shelby County v. Holder and the perilous future of the Act.