Democrats hire people who know how to do stuff. Republicans, at least of late, hire butt-lickers who are often clueless.
But just those specific and highly pertinent sections? 
There is some point at which we, the fraction of the American public that gives a damn, should stop giving these performative proto-fascists ‘the benefit of the doubt’. And frankly, that should have been on August 12, 2017, when Trump said “…you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” and not one Republican balked. Or, if you could choke down that ‘dog whistle’, the 2021 CPAC stage shaped like a Nazi-adopted Nordic rune. Or, when Trump unambiguously said, "I said homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places,” in response to questions about deporting undocumented immigrants to an El Salvadorian prison witn no due process, much less a criminal conviction.
I am all out of ‘benefit of the doubt’ and you should be, too. These people are mostly inept bumblers but they generally do—or at least try to do—what they intend anf say what they mean, if under their breath.
Stranger
Well, I picked 3 clauses (habeas corpus, export taxes, and states and military affairs) and checked them against the internet archive, and they hadn’t changed at all. It’d be a bit tedious to go through all of them.
I still think this is a good theory but maybe they just rolled it back to a known-good state and will quietly roll out the updates in the future.
For all we know they were going through and updating all the annotations, or the relevant ones at the moment, to be more fascism-friendly, but their coding fuckup only affected those 2 sections. Or more specifically, perhaps some stray character in section 9 rendered the rest of the article un…renderable, until article 2 reset the tags.
Upthread when I said I didn’t see how this could be a coding error, it’s because the HTML is so clean and simple it just felt like a static webpage. Why would anyone even need to touch it? Hence it seemed strange to be an uh-oh. But Buck_Godot’s theory is a good one – perhaps they were touching it specifically to try to rewrite history in the way fascists do. “The president has always had this power. See, it says so right here.” And now I think it’s probably generated by an in-house CMS.
It makes a lot more sense than them deleting sections altogether, which wouldn’t really accomplish much. Nobody’s going to forget that sections exist. But the gullible will certainly start reciting the party line about what those sections mean once dear leader tells them what they mean.
Why, I say that we should all take a deep breath and give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt!
“Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens.”
– Britney Spears (2003), in an interview with Tucker Carlson, about the Iraq invasion.
I don’t understand.
Deleting part of the constitution on purpose is clumsy and stupid.
Sinisterly rewriting an official constitutional educational site is effective and evil… and then accidentally fucking up the site while doing it is still clumsy and stupid.
This is not giving them the benefit of the doubt. It’s the opposite.
They do clumsy and stupid. Agreed.
They also do focused and intentional. We know this guy Trump and his people by now.
I took a deep breath and immediately started choking on all of the smokescreens and tear gas emitted by this regime. That benefit, like Medicaid coverage, NIH research grants, SSI, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, have been axed.
They can get some doubt of their seemingly deliberately bad intentions when they actually show some real consideration for anyone who isn’t a raving nutter anti-vaxxer, White Christian Nationalist, or top 0.01% of ‘workers’.
Stranger
Sometimes they do crazy and stupid to cover for the diabolical.
It’s a “win-win” for the Republicans: If they get away with it, literally more power to them. If they get caught in time, it is an “honest mistake” and they get to call Democrats hysterical.
In all honesty, I would be more open to believing in a conspiracy if they took out something that said the suspension of habeas corpus was never allowed. Yes it is only allowed to be suspended during rebellion and invasion, but isn’t the MAGA story that we are being invaded?
Or do you think that Trump realizes that won’t hold up in court thus by removing that section they are arguing suspension of habeas corpus is always allowed? And to those that argue that this administration can’t possibly think that removing that section from the website results in an actual amendment … I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
To be completed with a Sharpie.
When the “mistakes” are ALWAYS in one direction, a reasonable person starts to realize that they were not, at any time, actually mistakes.
I’m happy to look at any evidence which may exist that shows that this could have happened by accident. If the evidence is credible, I’ll accept and believe.
Until that time, though, I’ll use my common sense.