'Nobody believes you': Library of Congress blames missing Constitution sections on 'coding error'
'Nobody believes you': Library of Congress blames missing Constitution sections on 'coding error'
Awfully specific sections that didn't load.
2 removals and an edit, all 3 pertaining to things Trump's trying to bully his way into existence. Complete accident though.
Oh, they're still missing hours later? That's weird...
"We swear that our top developer, Chat GPT fixed the issue."
Devil's advocate, but depending on how the page is laid out in the code, it could be that the entirety of Article 1 is a section, so if a mistake was made at some point in the section it would affect the rest of it.
Considering they fired all of the competent people, it's within the realm of possibility that it was a fuck up. Shit, they might have just copy and pasted whatever chatgpt spit out.
But if it was really a coding error, all they'd have to do is provide the merge request.
People should read up on the leadership conflict currently going on at the Library of Congress.
On May 8, 2025, two days after Hayden had given testimony to the Senate Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on House Administration,[80][81] via email and without any explanation, she was abruptly fired by President Trump ... No replacement of Hayden has been nominated. Principal Deputy Librarian Robert Newlen,[86] who would have served as interim librarian was fired and Trump named Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as acting librarian of Congress and later fired the deputy librarian and copyright office director (Perlmutter and Newlen), appointing senior DOJ officials Brian Nieves and Paul Perkins as respectively, for the interim. This has been interpreted as an attack on the separation of powers.[87] Perlmutter has sued to dispute the legality of the dismissal,[88] as the Register is appointed by, and responsible to, the Librarian of Congress.
So currently there are two conflicting acting directors of LOC. One, who is a lawyer, appointed by Trump, whom noone at LOC accepts, and one librarian, who does the actual day to day administration.
It is curious that the article doesn't mention who is speaking for the LOC, they are just twitter messages by the LOC account. I bet that while the Trump sycophant has no power over any of the librarians in LOC, he is in control of the LOC twitter account and the website, with some external techbros doing his bidding, and that is all he has to play with, yet unsurprisingly enough still managed to turn everything into shit just with those slivers of control.
The actual staff of the LOC are just doing their library thing (their youtube channel has been very active lately with some knowledgeable and interesting stuff), while this piece of shit is busy doing his Trump shit.
Yes, a mistake. Which just happened to wipe out the exact parts of the Constitution that the President has been ignoring.
You know what? I'm going long con on this. I think some badass Librarian deleted those sections so that we would have to acknowledge publicly that those rights are indeed guaranteed in the Constitution.
We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon
Lol, this is a static site. A 5 minute change. Even if they have a process to run all changes through review and testing before deployment (which they don't or else this kind of "coding error" wouldn't have happened), this is fixed same-day. They're lying.
review and testing
TBF, who would write a test to test whether or not parts of the fucking Constitution had been removed?
If it was run on like, GitHub Pages, you would do a rollback.
I have support for rollbacks in my site cause I have blue-green...... I never use it, but I do have it!
"The dog ate the cookies!" said the toddler caught with chocolate on his face and his arm in the jar.
For those curious+lazy, the removed sections were "pertaining to Habeas Corpus and judicial review of unlawful detention".
And more, like the bit about no Ex Post Facto laws, emoluments, and titles.
and the entire US Navy
Release the Epstein files.
Whoopsie, what a mistake to make.
This is just like all those times he 'accidentally' ;-);-) raped all the little children and then refused to release the Epstein list.
Curious "coding error". The only "coding error" I can see here is that they already prepared the site for future changes they plan, and just executed them early.
They're just trying to make it harder to look up your rights. If they were actually trying to erase these sections there would be lawsuits or bills going through congress. Not saying that they aren't going to do that, just that this particular instance is more trying to withhold information.
This just gave me an idea, every website, blog, ect. should post a full text copy of the constitution. Hell I have a blog I don't post on that much, I might do this after work.
Very conveniently selected "error" I'd say.
If we ever get out of Trump's bullshit. We need a total rework of the power for the executive branch. It's been run on "good faith" for too long.
Yup. We can't rely on "Well, OK, there's no law about this, it's just how we've always done things."
Interestingly, in my high school course about legal systems, "tradition" was considered like a very low level law. Basically if "this is how we've always done things" and there's no explicit law, executive order or anything... it's legal
"coder" (stupid person term for what I do) here: No, this wasn't an accident.
Hear me out. They may have some shitty convoluted markup, and they wanted to make a change to make it "more maintainable" or some shit.
But it was so poorly laid out with no separation of html and CSS they needed to copy and paste it but by bit, and the junior they paid to do it wasn't really paying attention and missed a chunk.
Possible.
Or, and I think more likely, someone used an AI agent to make some change and it deleted a whole lot of shit, nobody checked what changed and they "shipped lots of changes, they have the best changes"
I don't think it was an amendment, so that part of the Constitution probably hasn't changed in 200 years
It’s like seeing a toddler with chocolate on their face denying that they just ate chocolate.
Turns out, all the Republican "constitutionalists" ever meant was that they wanted to be able to yell slurs and kill brown people with impunity. They just had to hide it behind noble-sounding language until the right Nazis were in power.
Off by one error I could believe if the articles are displayed through an array and not a purely plain text in a div. Off by two error I think not.
Off by 2 and a half. It makes no sense.
Classic error ID10T. Happens all the time when there's a short between the keyboard and chair.
Are they trying to pull an Animal Farm on the constitution?
Literally.
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
While technically plausible, I bet the explanation is somewhere in the middle:
Some Trump loyalist with access to this website, perhaps inspired by internal discussions or news, deleted these sections from the databases.
…Or something like that. Other extremes (following an official order, or a massively coincidental technical accident) just feel too implausible to be true.
My working theory is in the middle between yours and what they said.
This is based on my viewing of the content in question yesterday, and my decades of experience as a software developer, including web page development.
You didn't have to compare it to the original, it just looked wrong as it was. It looked to me like all of the content starting from Article I Section 8 until the end of Article I was all wrong. Like rendered weird and/or removed. All of a sudden, it was just a bunch of paragraphs that seemed out of place. No headings, for example.
I suspect that some MAGA was trying to change something, rather than delete all of the stuff that was deleted. Because A LOT was deleted. It can't be a coincidence that these sections are relevant to ongoing criticisms of Trump, but not all of the deleted parts were relevant. Somebody either tried to add/edit an annotation, or they tried to edit the wording of the Constitution directly.
And I suspect that whatever method they use to store the constitution and annotations is extremely error prone. And so, let's say that the person edited in a quotation mark ("). If the software doesn't handle characters like that properly, something like that alone can cause problems like what I saw.
So, in that case, they could call it a "coding error" and pretend like they weren't lying. Both the software for the website and markup for the data can be called "code".
On top of that, government software is usually done by the lowest permitted bidder, so it's not surprising if it is basically done by an amateur who doesn't know how to escape characters. Finally, the incompetence of trying to edit something without reading the instructions that surely exist, and without checking the result for unintended consequences, is exactly the sort of incompetence that I expect from MAGA.
I buy that. Yeah the messed up formatting is an excellent point, I've messed up formatting the exact same way forgetting an end tag or something.
So you think it was a 'hacker' or an external govt employee? Or someone internal to the dept that tried to do something that stupid?
I guess it could be either...
It’s sad that they think editing some html will in some way further their agenda to ignore the actual document.
And it’s sad that they might be right.
MAGA: "Coding error."
Translation: "The intent was to mark those sections deprecated for future deletion, but due to incompetence, the future version was published instead. We will revert that change until the legal formalities have been resolved."
I mean, his voters will believe it.
They'd jump off the empire state building if the Administration told them it would pwn the libs.
Ok, so should be easy and not controversial to restore them right?
You'd think, right? In like 30 seconds or so.
Edit Just checked it and the missing sections are now restored.
This came up in the thread last night. Why would you dynamically load content that, practically, never changes?
It ACTUALLY never changes. Even if it's Amended, the Amendment is an addition, nothing gets removed.
See: Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3:
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Yup, even the ban on alcohol is still an amendment (the 18th). It's just cancelled out by the 21st.
It's annotated, so it's possible that the annotations could change.
So brown people can be detained and deported easier. Duh.
because this is an annotated version of the constitution with legal analyses. those texts need to be updated occasionally with new case law.
It's almost like the base document can be loaded without annotations and never change. Then have the annotations load separately on top of the base page preventing even this odd "could be a tech issue" problem.
Don't accept their blaming tech for it. There is no reason that those annotations should even have been updated at this particular point anyway.
Because not all documents are immutable and it doesn't make sense to have a one off system. It is the same reason that most websites use the same CMS system for the "about us" page that might change one every two years as well as every single article and calendar.
But also... having an immutable document also feels like one of the best unit/sniff tests you can have.
Yes, the correct way to display a short simple document like this is plain html with bog-standard structure and indexing/metatext markup plus device and accessibility targeted css. That is it. Any scripts or references should fail fully gracefully back to web 1.0.
I would not be surprised if some 20 year old "vibe coder" touched it, since they don't know shit about computers they made bad choices.