You have read much about the "Constitution in Exile" and its crusade to return the Constitution to a limited view of federal power -- to a pre-1937 view where Social Security, Medicare, environmental laws, some civil rights laws, and the exercise of federal power generally is severely curtailed. But perhaps these illustrations are too remote in time to well illustrate the power of the Court.
So let's consider some of the decisions of the Warren Court, the demons incarnate in the eyes of the Federalist Society.
Let's look at the Warren Court record:
Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka Kansas - 1954 - Ruled the separate but equal doctrine unconstitutional.
In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.
. . . We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Baker v. Carr (right to vote):
A citizen's right to a vote free of arbitrary impairment by state action has been judicially recognized as a right secured by the Constitution, when such impairment resulted from dilution by a false tally, cf. United States v. Classic, 313 U.S. 299 ; or by a refusal to count votes from arbitrarily selected precincts, cf. United States v. Mosley, 238 U.S. 383 , or by a stuffing of the ballot box, cf. Ex parte Siebold, 100 U.S. 371 ; United States v. Saylor, 322 U.S. 385.
Engle v Vitale - 1962 - First Amendment - Separation of Church and State:
It has been argued that to apply the Constitution in such a way as to prohibit state laws respecting an [370 U.S. 421, 434] establishment of religious services in public schools is to indicate a hostility toward religion or toward prayer. Nothing, of course, could be more wrong. The history of man is inseparable from the history of religion. And perhaps it is not too much to say that since the beginning of that history many people have devoutly believed that "More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." It was doubtless largely due to men who believed this that there grew up a sentiment that caused men to leave the cross-currents of officially established state religions and religious persecution in Europe and come to this country filled with the hope that they could find a place in which they could pray when they pleased to the God of their faith in the language they chose. 20 And there were men of this same faith in the [370 U.S. 421, 435] power of prayer who led the fight for adoption of our Constitution and also for our Bill of Rights with the very guarantees of religious freedom that forbid the sort of governmental activity which New York has attempted here. These men knew that the First Amendment, which tried to put an end to governmental control of religion and of prayer, was not written to destroy either. They knew rather that it was written to quiet well-justified fears which nearly all of them felt arising out of an awareness that governments of the past had shackled men's tongues to make them speak only the religious thoughts that government wanted them to speak and to pray only to the God that government wanted them to pray to. It is neither sacrilegious nor antireligious to say that each separate government in this country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the people themselves and to those the people choose to look to for religious guidance.
Mapp v Ohio - 1961 - 4th Amendment
Imposed the "exclusionary rule" created by the Court in 1914 in Weeks v. U.S. in the federal sphere to the States, which makes illegally obtained evidence inadmissable in court.
Since the Fourth Amendment's right of privacy has been declared enforceable against the States through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth, it is enforceable against them by the same sanction of exclusion as is used against the Federal Government. Were it otherwise, then just as without the Weeks rule the assurance against unreasonable federal searches and seizures would be "a form of words," valueless and undeserving of mention in a perpetual charter of inestimable human liberties, so too, without that rule the freedom from state invasions of privacy would be so ephemeral and so neatly severed from its conceptual nexus with the freedom from all brutish means of coercing evidence as not to merit this Court's high regard as a freedom "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty."
Tinker v Des Moines - 1969 - First Amendment - Speech
Several students and parents in Des Moines organized a protest of the Vietnam war. Students were to wear black arm bands to school in protest. When the school found out they warned all the students and parents that anyone wearing the armbands would be would be suspended. The Court ruled against the school district saying that "students do not shed their constitutional rights at the school house gates.
Gideon v. Wainright - 1963 - Right To Counsel
Miranda v Arizona - 1966 - Requiring suspects be informed of their Constitutional rights.
Katz v. United States - 1961 - 4th Amendment - The Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment protected a citizen's person and not just property against illegal searches.
Plus Griswold (privacy), Times v. Sullivan (created the actual malice standard for speech regarding public figures and issues) and many many others.
So tell me, is the Supreme Court important or not? And what do you expect of a Roberts Court when it faces the monumental issues of the future as the Warren Court faced those of its time? Are you willing to roll the dice?