Some rabble-rousing private org, the National Constitution Center, still has those sections in its version. Must not have got the visit yet from the Library of Congress Police.
Looking a the page source I (a web developer) am struggling to come up with an explanation for how this could be a data issue. At the same time, I’m struggling to come up with a political reason why anyone thinks that removing sections from this page would accomplish anything.
Honestly, the only thing that makes sense to me right now is that the administration has some big list of “stupid stuff that will distract the media” and every few days they pull from that list randomly and enjoy a few moments of hey wait a minute where are the Epstein files?
Since there was no need whatsoever to go into that website to change anything, I would need to know what the actual intent of that supposed underpaid intern actually was.
It’s of no effect. There are legion copies and transcripts of the U.S. Constitution, including 13 surviving from the original 1787 print run of 500. The Library of Congress copy is not some official copy holding sway over the law of the land.
A 1787 hard copy is also on public display in several places, including the National Archives Rotunda (which, admittedly, could perhaps be closed or otherwise acted upon by Trumpian agents at any point).
In the image below, Article 1, Section 9 starts just over halfway down the page. Section 10 follows. It’s easiest seen and made out by enlarging and zooming in:
I haven’t looked at the code but, certainly, I’d expect this sort of thing to either be hardcoded into the HTML or stored as a single, large blob in a single table cell.
Your “creating headlines just for the sake of creating headlines” theory isn’t completely unreasonable. I’d probably lean towards a minor act of protest by a person who disagrees with the current administration, but I’d lean more strongly towards, “Probably not the biggest issue of the day.”
I’m willing to go with incompetence but I can’t imagine why fixing this would take a day or two. It is a copy/paste/submit problem. Could be fixed in a minute.
If the person with access to the server is still working there. Could be a disgruntled employee from one of the rounds of senseless layoffs, and now nobody left has edit privileges any more.
Just giving whoever a little bit of grace. Had something similar happened under Obama or Biden’s administrations, it would have largely gone unnoticed (or at least wouldn’t have been covered by any news outlets).
Thank you for your inquiry and your interest in the Library of Congress. Due to a coding error, some sections of Article 1 are missing on the Constitution Annotated website. We are aware of the issue and working to correct it. We expect this to be resolved soon. If you wish, we can send you an email notification when the issue is resolved.
