If you reduce all legislative action to "whatever it wants ... anytime it wants to" then there's no point in discussing any of this; they can just pass an amend

If you reduce all legislative action to "whatever it wants ... anytime it wants to" then there's no point in discussing any of this; they can just pass an amendment to the Constitution. You're right, it's not a common-sense definition, it's a "rule of law" definition. If the government decides to regulate encryption as arms, then it must deal with the consequences that it is admitting that encryption is arms, and that the constitutional limits on how it how it regulates arms apply to how it regulates encryption. Individual laws form a system, and even though parts of the government can change individual laws, they must still obey the system as a whole; that's what the rule of law is about.