The Supreme Court and the Constitution

Is the Constitution Still Relevant? No—What Matters is Who Has the Power to Decide What the Constitution Means
The Constitution is relevant when people want it to be, and irrelevant when they do not want it to be. For instance, everyone become a Constitutionalist when he starts arguing that habeas corpus (Article I), due process (5th and 14th Amendments) and freedom of speech (1st Amendment) are important. But at other times people argue that gun rights (2nd Amendment) should be overturned and arms confiscated and banned, or that safety should come before the right to privacy (3rd, 4th and 5th Amendments). Thus, people are generally torn about what parts of the Constitution are relevant and what parts are not. Typically, when it comes to themselves, they want the protections of the Constitution—so if they feel that society poses a threat to themselves, they generally want the right to bear arms. If they feel the government poses a tyrannical threat, they want habeas corpus, due process and freedom of speech. If they feel they have the right to their own privacy and do not want their homes searched or their digital data spied on by the NSA, they are in favor of Amendments 3 through 5. It all depends upon what people want. If they feel Big Brother has their best interests in mind, they typically do not care about the Constitution at all.
The Constitution does still protect and safeguard some of the rights and liberties of the people to extent promised by the Founding Fathers, but as Jefferson warned the Supreme Court has largely taken over defining what is meant by the Constitution through judicial review. Thus, the Constitution is now interpreted by the Supreme Court and it says what the law means. So overtime the rights and liberties supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution have been twisted and changed, giving more power to the totalitarian regime. Big Brother is now allowed to stop and frisk people (aka the Terry Stop). Big Tech openly spies on people (Alexa is always listening), and gun rights are increasingly being stripped because people with mental problems get guns and kill people. (When guns are finally banned, those same sick people will just use buses or cars or knives like they do in England and France). So the Constitution used to protect people more or less, but today it is up for grabs whether it will or not—it all depends on one’s lawyer and one’s judge and what the Supreme Court thinks about it. Everything is now open for interpretation because America has become a legalistic, swindling society.
Still most people do not seem to mind. The ones who saw all this coming were the Anti-Federalists: they rejected the Constitution outright because they knew that in the end it would led to a power grab by the central government, which is what has happened. The states were supposed to be strong, but now they are all dependent on federal money. The last time they challenged the federal government was when the Civil War broke out. Jefferson Davis wanted to take the matter of secession to the Courts and have it settled there—but Lincoln (being a lawyer) must have known better than to trust such an important issue to a judge so he baited the South into firing the first shot and then launched an all-out war.
So today the Constitution is not quite as relevant as it once was—but it was never really all that relevant, as Jefferson pointed out when the issue of judicial review came up. He knew the Supreme Court would eventually start determining what the Constitution meant and what it did not mean, and he knew that when that happened it would be the beginning of the end for law and order because the Supreme Court would be the unelected decider and judge of all things. It would have total power over everything, being at the top of the totem pole of government.
So when it comes to the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms, those who want to challenge that right may do so by coming up with some reason for why the Constitution should be interpreted in a way where it makes sense to ban guns. When it comes to the right to privacy, the Constitution has already been challenged and interpreted in such a way that one’s right to privacy as provided in the 3rd, 4th and 5th Amendments is basically meaningless. If a police officer wants to stop you, he can and will. If he wants to search your vehicle, he can and will. If he wants to search your home, he can come up with some excuse for doing so. If you want to exercise your right to free speech as provided in the 1st Amendment, you can do so—but you’ll just need permission from your local town—and you won’t be able to burn any flags because while that may seem like an expression that should be covered under free speech the totalitarians in DC think differently and they will not tolerate expressions of contempt directed by the little people towards themselves. But if you want to kill the baby in your womb at 8 weeks, that is okay because the 14th Amendment somehow applies in that case—though it does not apply to keeping other people’s eyes off what’s on your laptop or cell phone.
This is the type of insanity that has come along: the Constitution is basically whatever those in power want it to be. So if they want to promote abortion, they make up a reason for why the 14th Amendment protects what a woman does with the life growing in her womb—if she wants to kill that life, no problem. But if she decides she wants to kill that baby 1 week after it’s born, that’s infanticide. Unless you live in New York, where they are moving to legalizing infanticide, because why not—in today’s world the Constitution is whatever you want it to be, so long as you sit in the seat of power and authority. So what is really relevant? Power—the Constitution was a still birth.