Library of Congress Explains Vanishing US Constitution Sections Due to Coding Glitch

The Library of Congress has provided a detailed explanation for the recent disappearance of significant portions of the U.S. Constitution from its official website, attributing the incident to an inadvertent “coding error.”

Key sections of Article 1, including parts of Section 8 and the entirety of Sections 9 and 10, were removed from the government’s digital archives over the past month. These sections detail crucial congressional powers, states’ rights, and due process rights, sparking alarm among observers.

The vanishing text, first reported by TechCrunch, occurred during a period of heightened concern, particularly following threats to suspend habeas corpus. The Library of Congress initially stated the issue stemmed from a “coding error.”

Bill Ryan, the Director of Communications for the Library of Congress, informed TechCrunch that the error occurred during an update of the Constitution Annotated, an educational tool that includes analysis of Supreme Court opinions linked to the constitutional text. “When updating the site to reflect our constitutional scholars’ analysis of the impact of the latest cases on Article I, Sections 8-10, the team inadvertently removed an XML tag,” Ryan explained.

This single missing XML tag prevented the publication of all content following the middle of Section 8. XML, a standard markup language used extensively by the Library of Congress for website formatting, requires precise tagging; a missing closing tag can cause the parser to ignore subsequent content.

Ryan confirmed that the issue has since been resolved. “The problem has been corrected, and our updated constitutional analysis is now available,” he stated, adding that steps are being taken to prevent such an error from recurring.

The full text of the Constitution, along with the updated scholarly analysis, has now been reinstated on the Library of Congress website.