Everyone seems inclined to say that it’s to declaw habeas corpus. I’d suggest that everyone take note that the Article also has the Emoluments Clause within its phraseology.
Man, who transcribed that? Because their handwriting is horrible. I couldn’t make out a single word.
I think you are mis-remembering the Constitution. There has never been a Section 9 or 10 in Article I. Websites that claim that and doctored images purporting to show these in the ‘original’ document are fabrications. Please stand in full view of your view screen and prepare to be visited by Thinkpol representatives to be escorted to Miniluv for your reeducation.
“He who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future”. – George Orwell, 1984
Stranger
Section 9 and 10 are back. Is anything else missing?
“These ten…[crash!] Eight! Eight amendments!”
This thread needed more cow-Mel.
And what is at the beginning of the emoluments clause? Could it be “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States” ?
Yep.
As for the “it was an accident” (or “coding error”) explanation: The missing sections were missing both on the ‘text of the Constitution’ page AND on the ‘annotated explanation of the Constitution’ page.
Note that the acting Librarian of Congress is TODD BLANCHE.
Why did they do this? Partly to distract from Epstein. But also partly for the sheer pleasure of showing that they are in control, and if they find bits of the Constitution inconvenient, out those bits will go.
It’s a flex.
Feels more to me like a statement by someone dissatisfied with the administration and symbolically removing those parts than the other explanations.
Opinions are bound to differ. To me, if you disliked Trumpian doings and wanted to show your support for the sections on Habeas Corpus and the consent of Congress being required for levying tariffs (etc.) then you would NOT show that support by removing said sections. Maybe you’d code them so they appeared in extra-large font, for example. But you wouldn’t remove them.
This will likely be one of those things argued over without resolution, as I doubt that Mr. Blanche will ever be transparent about it. That’s not his style.
They have better ways to flex their power and show who’s in charge than removing some text on one website. And they have been doing so with the shit they’ve been ramming through Congress and executive orders. This would be peanuts and has no tangible effect. It’s a non-story to me. It’s not even on the CNN front page, and I wouldn’t even had known of it had I not come across this thread. Piss poor way of handling the Epstein deal if that was their motive. Now if they removed multiple instances of this across all government websites, that may be another story.
Sure, they’re doing worse stuff.
It does not follow logically that because they do X and Y, they would refrain from doing Z because it isn’t Big enough.
That’s part of the point of flexing. You don’t have to ration it. You can do any and all shitty stuff you feel like doing, and no one can stop you.
Like you said, there’s going to be disagreement in opinions about this.
My guess is that they were editing the annotations to more fully match the felonial interpretation (e.g. helpfully defining habeas corpus as “a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”) and they fucked it up. It would be interesting for someone (not me) to use the wayback machine to compare the current annotation to what it was a couple of weeks ago.
I’m doubling down on this theory. Reading the annotation of the emolument clause it is now almost totally taken up with discussion about how the courts didn’t find it applied to Trump, and the habeas corpus section is all about when it can be suspended.
More to the point, it is a way to gig the lib’rals and see how outraged they get by this penny ante legal vandalism, which serves as a gauge for what they can get away with in the media when it comes to bigger issues. Tyranny almost never comes all at once; it comes in dribs and drabs of authoritarian creep until you wake up one day and discover that while you are in something that has the facade of a democracy all actual institutions and civil liberties are effectively gone. Just ask pro-Palestinian protestors arrested in London, or Poland taking a hard-right turn in 2015 toward a far-right autocracy despite twenty-five years of leading the East Bloc into democratic reforms.
That deleting this portion of the Constitution from a government website is inane and in no way affects how courts will interpret law does not mean it wasn’t done with malicious intent and willful testing of boundaries. Like a small child who knows he can’t get away with a lie but does it anyway, it is really about seeing just how much he can fatigue his parents until he feels out the threshold of what he can get them without provoking punishment.
Stranger
Wow, that’s both highly, highly probably and absolutely fucking disgusting.
Yeah, that sounds much more plausible as to what happened.
It’s my theory that Donald and his primary minions, in their emotional development, never made it past the Terrible Twos. So this would fit.
Yes, that could be illuminating.
(Though if the plan was to edit the annotations to be more fascist-friendly, what need was there to remove the un-annotated text?)
My hypothesis would be that somehow in changing the annotation they fucked up the coding of the orignal pages.