Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public u…
This is why the Federalist Papers are some of the most important documents when understanding the intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights – and simultaneously the least read! I'm not saying that case law isn't also an important aspect of the 'law' and that the constitution shouldn't be amended – I'm not really a hardcore 'originalist' – I just mean that any time a SCOTUS ruling comes out, it's clear that in the…
Legislators change the law (including, rarely, the constitution) — effectively by applying a hierarchy of "countermanding orders" — to suit the changing interests of the public. Courts interpret the law, but only downstream of legislation. The executive can make regulation and executive orders, but only in agreement with the law.
But at the founding of any given country, something else usually happens: certain rights and laws that are already recognized intuitively become enshrined into the country's constitution. Things are written down into law not as a representation of a shift in public sentiment, but as a recognition of existing sentiment, and the desirability to formalize that sentiment as law to protect it from encroachment by legislation.
Usually, this is done in the form of "representative anarchy": the people who establish a country are the people everyone rallied behind to overthrow the previous country; and because of this, they have very good knowledge of what rights their constituents were demanding that the previous government wasn't giving them.
There's no trivial way to map this "representative anarchy" process of self-evident-rights information-gathering into an equivalent process that would occur within an established continuous government. But that doesn't mean it's impossible.
For example, there could be a government department charged with 1. doing a kind of embedded journalism to figure out what issues "the people" are beginning to care about, that the law's stance on has no clear basis, because those issues were irrelevant when the constitution was enshrined; and then 2. coming up with referrendum-like polls to gather data on said public sentiment; where if the polls indicate a need, then at that point 3. the data will lead to a mandate for a constitutional amendment enshrining the public's desires to be created and put into force, which stands until this has successfully occurred; where 4. it is then up to the legislature and the supreme court to work together to draft the amendment; but 5. the ability to ratify the amendment is not in the hands of the legislature or the courts, but instead, this department will assemble a federal grand jury with participants from all states, which has a veto over each draft, and a congressional-subpoena-like ability to summon and retain the services of arbitrary legal experts to interpret the draft. (In est, this is trying to get as close as possible to having the public write the amendment themselves, with the legislature+courts being forced to "do the hard work" but not having any power over the result.)
But exactly how such a system would work isn't really my point; my point is that there is currently no such system, and that this is perhaps a problem. In fact, it is perhaps the problem — the problem that leads to governments founded with public support increasingly failing to address the interests of the people over time; and so, to governments being overthrown and new countries being founded.