Library of Congress explains how parts of US Constitution vanished from its website

The Library of Congress has given a fuller explanation as to why large sections of the U.S. Constitution suddenly vanished from its official website.

As TechCrunch previously reported, parts of Section 8, as well as the entirety of Section 9 and Section 10, were deleted from Article 1 of the Constitution on the U.S. government’s official website over the past month. The changes to the sections, which pertained to the Congressional powers, the rights of individual states, and the rights to due process, sparked alarm at a time when the Trump administration has threatened to suspend habeas corpus.

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

TechCrunch reached out to the Library of Congress and received more insight into the issue: 

“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. 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,” Bill Ryan, the director of communications for the Library of Congress, told TechCrunch. 

“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,” said Ryan.

XML is a commonly used markup language used by the Library of Congress to format its website. A missing closing tag could plausibly result in missing text from the website, as anything outside of the tag would be ignored. 

The full text of the Constitution has now been reinstated on the Library of Congress’s website.