Constitution Deleted
As some of you recently pointed out, the U.S. Constitution seems to have vanished for a while.
Not the physical Constitution. To the best of my knowledge, that remained on display in the Rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.-though as I can tell you from experience, it will instantly vanish into the vault below if you lean on the glass case a little too hard, and then they're all like, EVERYBODY OUT! SOMEBODY LEANED ON THE CONSTITUTION TOO HARD AGAIN AND WE HAVE TO CLEAR OUT THE ROTUNDA TO GO LOOK FOR IT," acting like you meant to do it or something. Obviously, you didn't. But unless that happened again, the physical Constitution was on display the whole time.
But the text of the Constitution vanished from an official government website, and not just any official government website but the one at Congress.gov. Congress, you may remember, was one of three independent branches of government in the United States, and so at least for historical purposes it seems important that its website contain the full text of this once significant document. Yet sometime in July (as you can see above via the Wayback Machine), it seems to have been deleted.
It's back now, but it is a little concerning that nobody noticed for a couple of weeks.
Why did the Constitution disappear? An excellent question that many are asking, and that others will be asking later for different reasons, and while in custody, but according to the Library of Congress this problem was caused by a coding error."
It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated website," the LOC said in a Bluesky post yesterday. We've learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon." A banner on the site said it was experiencing data issues."
The issue" being that it was goneAbout four hours later, it announced the missing sections had been restored. Upkeep of the country's digital resources is a critical part of the Library's mission," it asserted, though it had temporarily misplaced the Constitution, and we appreciate the feedback that alerted us to the error and allowed us to fix it."
As the above suggests, at the time people started to notice this, only part of Article I was missing. The Wayback Machine seems to show it was all gone at one point, so it may have been restored (or was deleted) in sections rather than all at once. No explanation has been forthcoming as to why someone would do that, or maybe more to the point, why someone was monkeying with this particular webpage at all. Coding errors" don't happen by themselves (unless you used generative AI, in which case that was the coding error" you made).
Conspiracy theories were and are running rampant as to who did this and what the motive might have been. They were doing that in my own brain too for probably 12-15 seconds, but after just a little thought it seems likely incompetence is the culprit here, not malice. For one thing, apart from possibly the President, who thinks windmills kill whales, no one would think that deleting the Constitution from a website would have any legal effect.
Nor would deleting just parts of the Constitution, but I admit that like many others, I looked at which parts of Article I vanished and my brain started to form theories based on that evidence." But that too lasted only seconds, I think for two reasons.
One, that isn't how authoritarian governments work. They use the same words a democratic government would. They just ignore them or pretend they mean something very different. For example, the Soviet Union had a constitution that guaranteed lots of neat stuff like freedom of speech," freedom of the press," an independent judiciary, and the right of the republics to secede. And if you were interested in discussing any of that, they would gladly invite you to a conference in Siberia for that purpose. Same words, though.
Two, it was hard to see a motive for deleting the part of Article I that was missing, namely part of section 8 and all of 9 and 10. That would get rid of that pesky habeas corpus, for example, and the Emoluments Clause, which forbids any Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under" the United States from accepting anything from a foreign power (unless Congress consents). Not that any Person would ever violate those. But you can see how an authoritarian might not like them. But it's hard to see why they would care much about section 10, which prohibits states from doing things they don't really do these days anyway, or why they would take away Congress's power to provide and maintain a Navy" ( 8 cl. 13). They like navies. Also it would be weird to do that while preserving its power to define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas." Hard to do if you don't have boats.
So while I am not aware of any coding error" that would cause that text to just disappear, apart from the error of selecting the relevant code and erroneously hitting the delete" button, it seems very unlikely to me that there was any strategy here, much less a conspiracy. I would like to know why anyone felt the need to tinker with text that, with one exception, hasn't changed in quite a while. See Guy Who Got a C on Constitutional-Amendment Paper Gets Constitution Amended" (Mar. 20, 2017). But I don't think we need a second-shooter theory to explain this one.
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