Two days before Christmas in 2011, Dr. Brenda Williams, who together with her husband runs a small family-physician practice in Sumter, S.C., was on the road with him and their daughter when they got word that the U.S. Department of Justice had decided to challenge a strict new voter ID law signed by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Brenda hooted and hollered in the car—this had become a cause for her, ever since she realized how difficult it was going to be for many of her patients and other low-income black South Carolinians to obtain the paperwork needed to get the requisite photo ID. She had sent countless entreaties and documents to Washington making her case, and here was the reward: the DOJ was denying the South Carolina law “pre-clearance” under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Haley would protest the action loudly—I saw her on the campaign stump in Greenville a month later with Mitt Romney declaring that a Romney administration would let South Carolina do whatever it chose when it came to voting rules. But federal law was federal law, and as a result of the DOJ’s challenge, South Carolina agreed in the subsequent months of federal court hearings to significantly soften the new requirement to exempt anyone who had a “reasonable impediment” to obtaining ID.

That outcome is now consigned to a previous era. Today, Brenda Williams got word in Sumter that the landmark, 48-year-old law that had just recently been invoked to make restrictive voting rules slightly less so had been eviscerated in a 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court. “I’m disappointed,” she told me. “The Supreme Court took a cowardice stance…Why do I call it cowardice? Because the justices didn’t have the stamina to stand up against racism’s ugly face.”

At the heart of the case was a logical dispute: Roberts and his conservative colleagues on the court argue that strong turnout by African-American voters in Southern states is proof that racism is no longer driving voter suppression there, while the court’s minority argued that it was precisely the vigilance of the Voting Rights Act that had helped bring about and ensure that higher participation. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” wrote Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent, in what is surely one of the pithiest retorts in court history.

Based on Brenda Williams’ experience in South Carolina, it is indisputable that Ginsburg’s reading is correct: things would be a lot worse without the VRA. As Williams set out to help patients without the photo IDs required by the new law—state officials estimated there were 180,000 residents in that category—she found person after person for whom getting the ID would be a struggle. There was Thelma Hodge, a 76-year-old who lacked a birth certificate—when Williams called the local health department about getting one, she says she was told to "contact vital statistics." That led to a call to a company called VitalChek, which has rights to a national registry of birth certificates and charges $30 for a copy, plus a $12.95 handling fee, plus $9.75 shipping—a total of $64.70. Williams put it on her credit card, as she would for many of the other 100-plus people whom she helped secure IDs.