Why Does the U.S. Constitution Still Matter Today?

Last January, I watched TikTok go dark on 170 million American phones for less than a full day, then flicker back on before most users had time to panic. The app had been banned by an act of Congress, upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, then quietly un-banned by executive order before the ink on the opinion had dried. What struck me was not the app disappearing — it was that nine justices had just spent an argument session asking whether a 1791 sentence about "the freedom of speech" says anything about who is allowed to own a short-video algorithm. The Constitution is older than the telegraph, yet somehow it was still the document doing the deciding. That gap between the document's age and its authority is what pulled me toward constitutional law.

Figure 1. A smartphone screen filled with app icons — the kind of everyday technology the framers of 1787 never imagined regulating.  Image source: Unsplash.

A Framework Built to Bend

The framers wrote remarkably little detail into the Constitution's rights-bearing language. "Freedom of speech," "unreasonable searches," "due process" — these phrases are short because they were meant to be filled in by later generations, not because the framers anticipated every future dispute. Judicial review, established in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, gave courts the job of doing that filling-in, case by case. That structural choice is the real reason the document has outlasted almost every constitution written after it: it does not try to answer questions in advance. It creates a process for answering them later.

Figure 2. The original U.S. Constitution on display at the National Archives, Washington, D.C.  Image source: U.S. National Archives.

The TikTok Test

TikTok, Inc. v. Garland (2025) is a clean example of that process in action. Congress had passed a law forcing TikTok's Chinese owner to divest or exit the U.S. market, and TikTok argued the law punished a platform for its expressive content. The Court sidestepped the deepest question — whether regulating corporate ownership of a communications platform even counts as regulating speech — and upheld the law anyway under a lower level of scrutiny. In his concurrence, Justice Gorsuch reached back eighty years to Justice Frankfurter's warning about applying settled rules to the "totally new problems" once raised by the airplane and the radio. Algorithmic video is simply the newest entry on that list. No clause in the Constitution mentions apps, algorithms, or foreign-owned platforms, and none needed to.

Figure 3. The Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., where TikTok, Inc. v. Garland was decided in January 2025.  Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Interpretation as the Real Machinery

This is why the debate between originalism and living constitutionalism matters more than it sounds like it should. The document itself has been formally amended only twenty-seven times, and the two methods disagree sharply about how to treat everything the framers never wrote down. What they agree on, in practice, is that someone has to keep interpreting, because Congress does not rewrite the Bill of Rights every time a new technology appears. Deepfakes, encrypted messaging, and AI-generated speech will all eventually reach a court asking the same question TikTok did: does an old phrase reach this new fact?

Conclusion

What convinces me the Constitution still matters is not that it answered the TikTok question in advance — it obviously did not — but that it survived being asked. A document that could only govern the technology of its own century would have been replaced generations ago. Studying political science and eventually law, I am less interested in memorizing what the framers meant than in learning how each generation argues its way to an answer they didn't leave behind. That argument, not the parchment, is the part of the Constitution that is actually still working.

Sources

1. TikTok, Inc. v. Garland, 604 U.S. ___ (2025), Supreme Court of the United States, per curiam opinion and Gorsuch, J., concurring. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

2. Congressional Research Service (2025). TikTok Inc. v. Garland: Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to TikTok Divestiture Law. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11261

3. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803) — Oyez case summary. https://www.oyez.org/cases/1789-1850/5us137