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This case is rather the most typical one for application of the rules we have discussed.

There are, to be sure, cases where this Court has not applied with perfect consistency these rules for avoiding unnecessary constitutional determinations, and we do not mean to say that every case we have cited for various exceptions to their application was considered to turn on the exception stated, or is perfectly justified by it. The District Court relied primarily on United States v. Reese, supra. As we have indicated, that decision may have drawn support from the assumption that if the Court had not passed on the statute's validity in toto it would have left standing a criminal statute incapable of giving fair warning of its prohibitions. But to the extent Reese did depend on an approach inconsistent with what we think the better one and the one established by the weightiest of the subsequent cases, we cannot follow it here.

Accordingly, if the complaint here called for an application of the statute clearly constitutional under the

Secure, Protect, and Strengthen Civil Rights of Persons under the Constitution and Laws of the United States, 85th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 4-7, 36-37, 77, 81, 189, 205, 293, 300; Hearings before Subcommittee No. 5 of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, on Miscellaneous Bills Regarding the Civil Rights of Persons within the Jurisdiction of the United States, 85th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 656, 1220; 103 Cong. Rec. 8705, 12149, 12898, 13126, 13732.

Nor can there be any serious contention that the statute, as a civil enactment, would fail to give adequate notice of the conduct it validly proscribed, even if certain applications of it were to be deemed unconstitutional. Criminal proceedings under the statute must depend on violation of a restraining order embracing the party charged.

5 Cf., e. g., Illinois Central R. Co. v. McKendree, 203 U. S. 514; United States v. Ju Toy, 198 U. S. 253, 262–263.

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Opinion of the Court.

Fifteenth Amendment, that should have been an end to the question of constitutionality. And as to the application of the statute called for by the complaint, whatever precisely may be the reach of the Fifteenth Amendment, it is enough to say that the conduct charged-discrimination by state officials, within the course of their official duties, against the voting rights of United States citizens, on grounds of race or color-is certainly, as "state action" and the clearest form of it, subject to the ban of that Amendment, and that legislation designed to deal with such discrimination is "appropriate legislation" under it. It makes no difference that the discrimination in question, if state action, is also violative of state law. Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U. S. 1, 11. The appellees contend that since Congress has provided in subsection (d) of the statutory provision in question here that the District Courts shall exercise their jurisdiction "without regard to whether the party aggrieved shall have exhausted any administrative or other remedies that may be provided by law," and since such remedies were not exhausted here, appellees' action cannot be ascribed to the State. The argument is that the ultimate voice of the State has not spoken, since higher echelons of authority in the State might revise the appellees' action. It is, however, established as a fundamental proposition that every state official, high and low, is bound by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. See Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U. S. 1, 16-19. We think this Court has already made it clear that it follows from this that Congress has the power to provide for the correction of the constitutional violations of every such official without regard to the presence of other authority in the State that might possibly revise their actions. The appellees can draw no support from the expressions in Barney v. City of New

Opinion of the Court.

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York, 193 U. S. 430, on which they so much rely. The authority of those expressions has been "so restricted by our later decisions," see Snowden v. Hughes, supra, at 13, that Barney must be regarded as having "been worn away by the erosion of time," Tigner v. Texas, 310 U. S. 141, 147, and of contrary authority. See Raymond v. Chicago Union Traction Co., 207 U. S. 20, 37; Home Tel. & Tel. Co. v. Los Angeles, 227 U. S. 278, 283-289, 294; Iowa-Des Moines Nat. Bank v. Bennett, 284 U. S. 239, 247; Snowden v. Hughes, supra; Screws v. United States, 325 U. S. 91, 107-113, 116. Cf. United States v. Classic, 313 U. S. 299, 326. It was said of Barney's doctrine in Home Tel. & Tel. Co. v. Los Angeles, supra, at 284, by Mr. Chief Justice White: "[its] enforcement would . . . render impossible the performance of the duty with which the Federal courts are charged under the Constitution." The District Court seems to us to have recognized that the complaint clearly charged a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment and of the statute, and that the statute, if applicable only to this class of cases, would unquestionably be valid legislation under that Amendment. We think that under the rules we have stated, that court should then have gone no further and should have upheld the Act as applied in the present action, and that its dismissal of the complaint was error.

6 Barney was a property owner's action to enjoin state officials from construction of a rapid transit tunnel in a particular place. The suit was brought directly under the Fourteenth Amendment in federal court, and it was averred that the proposed action of the state officials was not authorized under state law. It does not appear that the complainant alleged that higher state administrative echelons were indisposed to halt the unauthorized actions or that the State offered no remedy at all to a property owner threatened with interference with his property by state officials acting without authority. There was not presented any specific federal statute expressly authorizing federal judicial intervention with matters in this posture.

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Opinion of the Court.

The appellees urge alternative grounds on which they seek to support the judgment of the District Court dismissing the complaint. We do not believe these grounds are well taken. It is urged that it is beyond the power of Congress to authorize the United States to bring this action in support of private constitutional rights. But there is the highest public interest in the due observance of all the constitutional guarantees, including those that bear the most directly on private rights, and we think it perfectly competent for Congress to authorize the United States to be the guardian of that public interest in a suit for injunctive relief. See United Steelworkers v. United States, 361 U. S. 39, 43, and cases cited. Appellees raise questions as to the scope of the equitable discretion reserved to the courts in suits under § 2004. Cf. id., at 41-42. We need not define the scope of the discretion of a District Court in proceedings of this nature, because, exercising a traditional equity discretion, the court below declined to dismiss the complaint on that ground, and we do not discern any basis in the present posture of the case for any contention that it has abused its discretion. Questions as to the relief sought by the United States are

7 Many of these contentions are raised by what appellees style a "cross-appeal." Notice of cross-appeal was filed in the District Court, but the cross-appeal was not docketed here. However, since the judgment of the District Court awarded appellees all the relief they requested (despite rejecting most of their contentions, except the central one), no cross-appeal was necessary to bring these contentions before us if they can be considered otherwise. They would simply be alternative grounds on which the judgment below could be supported. In view of the broad nature of § 1252, which seems to indicate a desire of Congress that the whole case come up (contrast 18 U. S. C. § 3731, United States v. Borden Co., 308 U. S. 188, 193), we have the power to pass on these other questions, and since the District Court expressed its views on most of them, we also deem it appropriate to do so.

FRANKFURTER, J., concurring.

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posed, but remedial issues are hardly properly presented at this stage in the litigation.

The parties have engaged in much discussion concerning the ultimate scope in which Congress intended this legislation to apply, and concerning its constitutionality under the Fifteenth Amendment in these various applications. We shall not compound the error we have found in the District Court's judgment by intimating any views on either matter.

Reversed.

MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER, with whom MR. JUSTICE HARLAN concurs, joining in the judgment.

The weighty presumptive validity with which the Civil Rights Act of 1957, like every enactment of Congress, comes here is not overborne by any claim urged against it. To deal with legislation so as to find unconstitutionality is to reverse the duty of courts to apply a statute so as to save it. Here this measure is sustained under familiar principles of constitutional law. Nor is there any procedural hurdle left to be cleared to sustain the suit of the United States. Whatever may have been the original force of Barney v. New York, 193 U. S. 430, that decision has long ceased to be an obstruction, nor is any other decision in the way of our result in this case. And so I find it needless to canvass the multitude of opinions that may generally touch on, but do not govern, the issues now before us.