I am pretty sure that the reactionary wing of the SCOTUS will find a way to overturn the VRA. The question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? It clearly depends on the way the question is looked at.
Let me begin by stating clearly that I do not support the Scalia wing of the Court. I am not trolling here.
The Bad
There are so many bad aspects to the Court's ruling VRA unconstitutional as I fully expect it to do in a 5 to 4 decision. These are not in order of importance, because I just cannot figure that part out.
The first is the damage that it will do to the Court itself. The Court has been destroying its legitimacy for a long time, going all the way back to Bush v. Gore. Shelby County will be only one more strike against the Court, showing that over 200 years of Court concepts like precedent no longer matter. The reactionary wing of the Court is nothing but a bit player in a larger production, just another political actor. The damage that this does to the country though is very serious. There is no longer an impartial referee, no arbiter of the bigger national issues. Bad things have always happened to the nation when this has occurred in the past, see Dred Scott.
This decision and countless others clearly shows that the Court wants to roll the concept of Federal power back to somewhere around 1857, yes that is the year of Dred Scott. The reactionaries do not believe in the power of Congress to address major national issues. Shelby County is not just about race, although it is a part of it. It is about the power of Congress to use its authority that has been granted under the different clauses of the Constitution. This specific case is about the authority Congress has to enforce the 15th Amendment, but other clauses are even more under attack. Scalia and his pals have been whittling away at the Commerce Clause for years Just look at the decision upholding the ACA. Roberts couldn't bring himself to overturn ACA, but he did undercut the power Congress had under the Commerce Clause by ruling that the case was constitutional because it was a tax, and not due to Congress' power to regulate the economy via the Commerce Clause. Any first year law student before that case would have failed if they had said such a piece of legislation was unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause. Any thoughts to the contrary would have had to be argued at the Federalist Society meeting in some basement.
The Constitutional is also being damaged, or the idea of a Constitution. What need is there for a Constitution if none of its Clauses are worth the paper they are written on, none but the 1st Amendment for Corporations and the 2nd Amendment that is. If there is no Constitutional power of the government to act, then there will be a power vacuum that will be filled. And we need to be clear, this Court is not just restricting the Federal government. It is also restricting the power of state and local governments to act where those governments have clear constitutional authority under their own constitutions. The power vacuum will thus be filled by the corporations that governments up and down the federal line should be counter-balancing.
The Good
Remember last year when states like Florida and Ohio tried to play hinky with the voting rights of African-Americans? Besides the beating that they got in the press, or at least parts of it, the plans didn't work. Short of turning out gangs of hoodlums or the Nation Guard or Police to drive of voters, nothing was going to prevent people who were the targets from voting. And I think even direct attacks by the aforementioned would not have worked. People stood in line for HOURS in all kinds of weather. They were not going to be stopped.
Although I believe that the motives behind this case are bigger than race, it is also about race. Reactionary whites want to prevent brown people from voting as the nation becomes more brown. This is partly because they don't like brown and black people voting, but it is also because brown people overwhelming support left of center politicians and the Democratic Party. Take away the party's base that is more willing to challenge corporate power and not support conservative "values" and that party will be neutered. If brown people supported the reactionaries at the polls, this would not be such a high priority for them. But alas it is.
So how is this good? For the same reason that people would not be driven away from the polls last year, they will not let their rights be taken away by another maneuver. In fact, the push back will be even more fierce and in more ways. Remember, this will affect Latinos and Asians just as much as it will affect African-Americans. Places like Texas and Arizona have long histories of preventing Latinos from voting. If you think that Latinos and Asians don't vote, just watch. They will turn out in numbers that only a few years ago were unheard of. They will be organized and radicalized not just on the issue of voting, but on other issues. Voting is not the only issue they care about, and groups will work to educate them even more than they already are on these other issues.
White moderates and progressives will join in the push back. There is an inherent sense of fairness in most Americans who will not like seeing the attempts to roll back the clock as they remember images of fire hoses and police dogs from the 1960s. There are other images they will remember, burning cities as riots ravaged the nation. There will be no stomach for that as well. And in the process, many of these moderates will be ripe for more radicalization as well.
In short, this country will not be South Africa pre-Mandala's release and the fall of Apartheid. The reactionaries may wish for it, but it will not come
There is one more reason that those who seek to create a corporate oligarchy may wish they had not sown what they will reap. There is a growing populism in this country. There are many strains of it. We tend to focus on the Tea Party types and there anti-government rhetoric, but there is another type, anti-corporatism. It is actually even heard in the Tea Party rhetoric, but is bigger than that. It is the otherwise conservative farmer who chains him/her self to a tractor to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. It is the organizers who are campaigning against new coal fired power plants which have resulted in none being built for a year or more.
As people fight these battles, and win at least with respect to coal fired power plants, they will be willing to challenge other corporations that these activists see as threatening or destructive to their lives. Maybe they will not support gay or abortion rights, but they will become more open to questioning and fighting corporate power. And maybe as they work alongside more progressive people, some of those views will rub off on them. This last part is more hope than anything else.
As other factors begin to play into the equation, factors like the pain of the sequester, this populism will also take on a more radial appearance. Some will go right, but others will go left, especially brown people who are currently the closest to the front lines. The reactionaries on the SCOTUS and others are starting something. I don't think it is going to go the way they think it will when it is all over.