Library of Congress Explains How Parts of US Constitution Vanished From Its Website
The Library of Congress has provided a comprehensive explanation for the sudden disappearance of significant portions of the U.S. Constitution from its official website.
As previously reported, key parts of Section 8, along with the entirety of Sections 9 and 10 of Article 1, were removed from the U.S. government’s official online Constitution over the past month. These sections are vital, detailing Congressional powers, the rights of individual states, and due process. Their absence raised immediate concern, particularly given recent political discussions that included threats to suspend habeas corpus.
Following the initial reports, the Library of Congress briefly stated via Twitter that the omissions were due to a “coding error.”
Seeking further clarity, TechCrunch reached out to the Library of Congress. Bill Ryan, the institution’s Director of Communications, elaborated on the issue in his statement.
“The online Constitution Annotated is an educational tool which includes discussions of the Supreme Court’s latest opinions linked to the text of the Constitution,” Ryan explained. “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 continued, “This prevented publication of everything in Article I after the middle of Section 8. The problem has been corrected, and our updated constitutional analysis is now available. We are taking steps to prevent a recurrence in the future.”
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a standard markup language utilized by the Library of Congress for website formatting. A simple error like a missing closing tag could indeed cause the system to disregard subsequent content, explaining the broad scope of the missing text.
The full and accurate text of the Constitution has now been fully reinstated on the Library of Congress’s website, resolving the technical anomaly.
