[dalek_cannes]

Because democracy without an underlying system of values is indistinguishable from a tyranny by the majority (in other words, it cannot be two foxes and a hen voting on what's for dinner). That underlying system of values, as I understand, is the constitution. A law can be unconstitutional even if the entirety of congress votes in favor. While specific needs of American society have changed, I don't believe the values espoused by the US founders have changed a great deal over the past two centuries.

Disclaimer: not an American.

[Ntrails]

Is it not similarly "tyrannical" to be bound by the views of people who lived a few hundred years ago. I believe that the constitution specifically forbade the vote to certain segments of society by race/gender? Which is one example where values have changed significantly.

Not to mention, there have been amendments to the constitution as I understand it - or are those only additions rather than contradictions/supercededants?

[tobiasSoftware]

American here, what Dalek_Cannes said was correct, but to add to that, we have a system to change the underlying views. These are called Amendments, and that is how we changed the underlying view to allow everyone to vote. The difference between an Amendment and ordinary laws is that Amendments are really, really, really big deals that have the authority to redefine those value systems instead of working within the definition as ordinary laws can.

There are only 27, the first 10 of which was kind of a "Constitution out of beta" thing that all happened at once, so you can kind of consider there to be 17 changes to the underlying values. That way when one occurs it's a BIG DEAL and can't sneak past the people as easily as say, the Patriot act or the NDAA, both of which are pretty easy to make a case against that they go against the core values but were voted on quickly at times no one was looking.

Also we have a separation of powers where Congress creates laws, the President acts as a leader and can also prevent Congress from creating laws in some cases, and the Supreme Court can challenge legality of laws. The idea is that the Supreme Court challenges laws against Constitution + Amendments, so they can strike down a law as being unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court does not have the power to strike down an Amendment as it by definition is the constitution.

If Congress creates bad laws, it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to point it out. However they are only legally allowed to do that when a case is put before them. Imagine being legally restrained from refactoring unless a customer files a bug report. Part of the reason the US is having some trouble with laws as I understand it is Congress + some organizations are working to prevent laws from going to the Supreme Court on technicalities. Such as person X tries to take law Y to the court with evidence Z, but evidence Z is "classified" so they are legally not supposed to know the evidence and cannot legally present it in court.

A similar problem our country is facing is that the lack of refactorization is catching up to us so our legal system has become an insane mess that only highly trained specialists (lawyers) can even attempt to navigate. Then people learn how to abuse the system and can try to attack people on all the un-refactored points of the law. This is how patent trolls work, the addition of the law (patent) is a relatively easy process and the removal of bad laws (bad patents) can only be done by challenging it in court. This causes thousands of bad patents to exist because no one can challenge them until it is used against someone.