Congress appears to have quietly deleted major parts of the constitution from their website in a concerning move.
This was reported by multiple outlets that sections 9, 10 and a large part of section 8 had been removed from the Congress website on a page that contains an annotated version of the constitution.
These sections of the constitution include discussion of the powers that the written law gives Congress and powers that it denies to the body.
In section 10, the constitution discusses the powers that it denies to the states.
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In section 9, it also discusses a protection that Americans have from unlawful detention.
In the constitution, it reads: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
The missing parts have since been restored to the Congress website, but concerns have been raised as to why they were missing.
The news has been doing the rounds on social media, with many people sharing their own theories on what might have happened.
On Reddit, one user wrote: “They must think that removing those portions from their own site changes the constitution.”
Another said: “Somebody kicked a plug out of a Congress.gov server (edit; not literally, but somebody who was updating congress.gov messed up) or somebody deliberately f***ed up.”
And a third person added: “This isn't a server problem- this is deliberate.”
Concerns were raised back in May when the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, spoke to reporters revealing that the Trump government was ‘looking at’ potentially suspending the writ of habeas corpus written in the constitution in cases of migrants, under claims of an ‘invasion’.
In a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter, the Library of Congress said: “It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (https://constitution.congress.gov) website. 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.”
In a separate tweet, the account went on to say: “UPDATE: Missing sections of the Constitution Annotated website have been restored. Upkeep of Constitution Annotated and other digital resources is a critical part of the Library’s mission, and we appreciate the feedback that alerted us to the error and allowed us to fix it.”