Significant parts of the Constitution were quietly removed from the Congress website but have since been restored.
Multiple outlets reported Wednesday Sections 9 and 10, and a large chunk of Section 8, had vanished from the website’s annotated version.
Section 8 discusses the powers the Constitution gives Congress and Section 9 discusses the powers it denies to the legislative body. Section 10 discusses the powers the Constitution denies to the states.
Notably, Section 9 mentions the Writ of Habeas Corpus, which protects Americans from unlawful detention.
“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 Constitution reads.
In May, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller told reporters the Trump administration is “looking at” suspending the writ of habeas corpus for migrants under claims of an “invasion.”
The missing text sparked an online frenzy with Reddit users questioning what happened.
“They must think that removing those portions from their own site changes the constitution,” one Reddit user from the military subreddit r/Military wrote Wednesday morning.
One Reddit user suggested: “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.”
“This isn’t a server problem- this is deliberate,” another replied.
The Library of Congress said the missing text was an accident.
“It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated…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,” the library wrote on X at around 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday.
The White House did not give The Independent a comment when asked about the coding error.
No matter the intentions behind the sections’ removal, the incident “raises serious transparency concerns,” MediasTouch News wrote in an article.
The temporary glitch did not affect the validity of the laws removed from the online version of the Constitution.
The Library of Congress posted shortly after 3 p.m. the missing sections had 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,” the library wrote.
