This came up in the thread last night. Why would you dynamically load content that, practically, never changes?
It ACTUALLY never changes. Even if it’s Amended, the Amendment is an addition, nothing gets removed.
See: Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3:
“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
That’s what the s html element is for:
<s>strikethrough</s>strikethrough(not to be confused with
/sfor sarcasm)That and using # for Trump headers like so:
TRUMP ISN’T RACIST, YOU’RE RACIST!
So hot right now.
you can also use markdown to strikethrough by putting two swintons on each sideswintons
Ha! That took me a little longer than I care to admit, but I actually lol’d.
Still waiting on that tag to be canonical
<sarcasm>sorry not sorry</sarcasm>The default CSS style should do a text transform to:
sOrRY NoT sorrY
AbsoFUKANlutely
It’s annotated, so it’s possible that the annotations could change.
Annotations could be a separate call based on a simple section tag with an id, very compatible.
So brown people can be detained and deported easier. Duh.
because this is an annotated version of the constitution with legal analyses. those texts need to be updated occasionally with new case law.
It’s almost like the base document can be loaded without annotations and never change. Then have the annotations load separately on top of the base page preventing even this odd “could be a tech issue” problem.
Don’t accept their blaming tech for it. There is no reason that those annotations should even have been updated at this particular point anyway.
I said nothing about accepting tech problems or assigning blame. it’s simply a sensible design for a website that is occasionally updated to use dynamically loaded elements.
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If the tech issue is real, it’s because they were changing these annotations to basically the same effect, downplaying or deleting these sections of the constitution. (Not currently capitalized.)
Because not all documents are immutable and it doesn’t make sense to have a one off system. It is the same reason that most websites use the same CMS system for the “about us” page that might change one every two years as well as every single article and calendar.
But also… having an immutable document also feels like one of the best unit/sniff tests you can have.
Yes, the correct way to display a short simple document like this is plain html with bog-standard structure and indexing/metatext markup plus device and accessibility targeted css. That is it. Any scripts or references should fail fully gracefully back to web 1.0.
This came up in the thread last night. Why would you dynamically load content that, practically, never changes?
I would not be surprised if some 20 year old “vibe coder” touched it, since they don’t know shit about computers they made bad choices.
Awfully specific sections that didn’t load.
2 removals and an edit, all 3 pertaining to things Trump’s trying to bully his way into existence. Complete accident though.
Oh, they’re still missing hours later? That’s weird…
“We swear that our top developer, Chat GPT fixed the issue.”
More likely Grok.
Was it praising Hitler or drawing nude pictures of Taylor Swift?
It was drawing nude pictures of Hitler.
Grok is capable of many of things. It can pronounce to everyone that it is the next mecha-Hitler and create nude deep fakes of Taylor Swift.
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Fuck you and your devil’s advocate the results are what matter and the results are what we’re planned, get your head out of your fucking ass
Nah I’m blaming AI for this one too.
But why is AI fucking with the constitution at all? Dunno
But why is AI fucking with the constitution at all? Dunno
This. All of these hypotheticals and excuses people are making are missing/ignoring 1 simple detail:
Why were they editing The Constitution to begin with?
It only changes through acts of Congress and requires a super-majority. So why were they editing it?
@onslaught545 - Seriously? You’re going the “code layout” route? Even a syntax error wouldn’t leave the rest of Section 8 unaffected while removing the hundreds of pages after it. Seriously, look at the site’s structure, each section has hundreds of pages. This isn’t a fluke.
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For those curious+lazy, the removed sections were “pertaining to Habeas Corpus and judicial review of unlawful detention”.
And more, like the bit about no Ex Post Facto laws, emoluments, and titles.
and the entire US Navy
Whoopsie, what a mistake to make.
This is just like all those times he ‘accidentally’ ;-);-) raped all the little children and then refused to release the Epstein list.They’re just trying to make it harder to look up your rights. If they were actually trying to erase these sections there would be lawsuits or bills going through congress. Not saying that they aren’t going to do that, just that this particular instance is more trying to withhold information.
This just gave me an idea, every website, blog, ect. should post a full text copy of the constitution. Hell I have a blog I don’t post on that much, I might do this after work.
Curious “coding error”. The only “coding error” I can see here is that they already prepared the site for future changes they plan, and just executed them early.
People should read up on the leadership conflict currently going on at the Library of Congress.
On May 8, 2025, two days after Hayden had given testimony to the Senate Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on House Administration,[80][81] via email and without any explanation, she was abruptly fired by President Trump … No replacement of Hayden has been nominated. Principal Deputy Librarian Robert Newlen,[86] who would have served as interim librarian was fired and Trump named Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as acting librarian of Congress and later fired the deputy librarian and copyright office director (Perlmutter and Newlen), appointing senior DOJ officials Brian Nieves and Paul Perkins as respectively, for the interim. This has been interpreted as an attack on the separation of powers.[87] Perlmutter has sued to dispute the legality of the dismissal,[88] as the Register is appointed by, and responsible to, the Librarian of Congress.
So currently there are two conflicting acting directors of LOC. One, who is a lawyer, appointed by Trump, whom noone at LOC accepts, and one librarian, who does the actual day to day administration.
It is curious that the article doesn’t mention who is speaking for the LOC, they are just twitter messages by the LOC account. I bet that while the Trump sycophant has no power over any of the librarians in LOC, he is in control of the LOC twitter account and the website, with some external techbros doing his bidding, and that is all he has to play with, yet unsurprisingly enough still managed to turn everything into shit just with those slivers of control.
The actual staff of the LOC are just doing their library thing (their youtube channel has been very active lately with some knowledgeable and interesting stuff), while this piece of shit is busy doing his Trump shit.
We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon
Lol, this is a static site. A 5 minute change. Even if they have a process to run all changes through review and testing before deployment (which they don’t or else this kind of “coding error” wouldn’t have happened), this is fixed same-day. They’re lying.
review and testing
TBF, who would write a test to test whether or not parts of the fucking Constitution had been removed?
If it was run on like, GitHub Pages, you would do a rollback.
I have support for rollbacks in my site cause I have blue-green… I never use it, but I do have it!
Turns out, all the Republican “constitutionalists” ever meant was that they wanted to be able to yell slurs and kill brown people with impunity. They just had to hide it behind noble-sounding language until the right Nazis were in power.
Yes, a mistake. Which just happened to wipe out the exact parts of the Constitution that the President has been ignoring.
You know what? I’m going long con on this. I think some badass Librarian deleted those sections so that we would have to acknowledge publicly that those rights are indeed guaranteed in the Constitution.
“The dog ate the cookies!” said the toddler caught with chocolate on his face and his arm in the jar.
Release the Epstein files.
Are they trying to pull an Animal Farm on the constitution?
Literally.
“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
While technically plausible, I bet the explanation is somewhere in the middle:
Some Trump loyalist with access to this website, perhaps inspired by internal discussions or news, deleted these sections from the databases.
…Or something like that. Other extremes (following an official order, or a massively coincidental technical accident) just feel too implausible to be true.
My working theory is in the middle between yours and what they said.
This is based on my viewing of the content in question yesterday, and my decades of experience as a software developer, including web page development.
You didn’t have to compare it to the original, it just looked wrong as it was. It looked to me like all of the content starting from Article I Section 8 until the end of Article I was all wrong. Like rendered weird and/or removed. All of a sudden, it was just a bunch of paragraphs that seemed out of place. No headings, for example.
I suspect that some MAGA was trying to change something, rather than delete all of the stuff that was deleted. Because A LOT was deleted. It can’t be a coincidence that these sections are relevant to ongoing criticisms of Trump, but not all of the deleted parts were relevant. Somebody either tried to add/edit an annotation, or they tried to edit the wording of the Constitution directly.
And I suspect that whatever method they use to store the constitution and annotations is extremely error prone. And so, let’s say that the person edited in a quotation mark ("). If the software doesn’t handle characters like that properly, something like that alone can cause problems like what I saw.
So, in that case, they could call it a “coding error” and pretend like they weren’t lying. Both the software for the website and markup for the data can be called “code”.
On top of that, government software is usually done by the lowest permitted bidder, so it’s not surprising if it is basically done by an amateur who doesn’t know how to escape characters. Finally, the incompetence of trying to edit something without reading the instructions that surely exist, and without checking the result for unintended consequences, is exactly the sort of incompetence that I expect from MAGA.
I buy that. Yeah the messed up formatting is an excellent point, I’ve messed up formatting the exact same way forgetting an end tag or something.
So you think it was a ‘hacker’ or an external govt employee? Or someone internal to the dept that tried to do something that stupid?
I guess it could be either…
I’d go by Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I feel like there should be an addendum called Trump’s razor: if there’s a possible explanation that’s both malicious AND stupid, it’s probably the correct one. Your previous theory would fit.
I was thinking the same. tRump’s Razor starts as malice and, through sheer incompetence, becomes stupid.
i’ve run into far too much naked malice lately to attribute it to stupidity
In that case, it would not be adequately explained as stupidity.
“coder” (stupid person term for what I do) here: No, this wasn’t an accident.
Hear me out. They may have some shitty convoluted markup, and they wanted to make a change to make it “more maintainable” or some shit.
But it was so poorly laid out with no separation of html and CSS they needed to copy and paste it but by bit, and the junior they paid to do it wasn’t really paying attention and missed a chunk.
Possible.
Or, and I think more likely, someone used an AI agent to make some change and it deleted a whole lot of shit, nobody checked what changed and they “shipped lots of changes, they have the best changes”
I don’t think it was an amendment, so that part of the Constitution probably hasn’t changed in 200 years
