Library Of Congress Explains How Parts Of Us Constitution Vanished From Its Website

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5:55 AM PDT · August 7, 2025

The Library of Congress has fixed a fuller mentation arsenic to why ample sections of nan U.S. Constitution abruptly vanished from its charismatic website.

As TechCrunch antecedently reported, parts of Section 8, arsenic good arsenic nan entirety of Section 9 and Section 10, were deleted from Article 1 of nan Constitution connected nan U.S. government’s charismatic website complete nan past month. The changes to nan sections, which pertained to nan Congressional powers, nan authorities of individual states, and nan authorities to owed process, sparked siren astatine a clip erstwhile nan Trump management has threatened to suspend habeas corpus.

After nan changes were reported, nan Library of Congress tweeted that nan sections were missing owed to a “coding error.” 

TechCrunch reached retired to nan Library of Congress and received much penetration into nan issue: 

“The online Constitution Annotated is an acquisition instrumentality which includes discussions of nan Supreme Court’s latest opinions linked to nan matter of nan Constitution. When updating nan tract to bespeak our law scholars’ study of nan effect of nan latest cases connected Article I, Sections 8-10, nan squad inadvertently removed an XML tag,” Bill Ryan, nan head of communications for nan Library of Congress, told TechCrunch. 

“This prevented publication of everything successful Article I aft nan mediate of Section 8. The problem has been corrected, and our updated law study is now available. We are taking steps to forestall a recurrence successful nan future,” said Ryan.

XML is simply a commonly utilized markup connection utilized by nan Library of Congress to format its website. A missing closing tag could plausibly consequence successful missing matter from nan website, arsenic thing extracurricular of nan tag would beryllium ignored. 

The afloat matter of nan Constitution has now been reinstated connected nan Library of Congress’s website.

Dominic-Madori Davis is simply a elder task superior and startup newsman astatine TechCrunch. She is based successful New York City. You tin interaction her connected Signal astatine +1 (646)-831-7565.

Zack Whittaker is nan information editor astatine TechCrunch. He tin beryllium reached via encrypted connection astatine zackwhittaker.1337 connected Signal, aliases by email astatine zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com.

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