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 sideStill 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
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.
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.”
Devil’s advocate, but depending on how the page is laid out in the code, it could be that the entirety of Article 1 is a section, so if a mistake was made at some point in the section it would affect the rest of it.
Considering they fired all of the competent people, it’s within the realm of possibility that it was a fuck up. Shit, they might have just copy and pasted whatever chatgpt spit out.
But if it was really a coding error, all they’d have to do is provide the merge request.
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.
Very conveniently selected “error” I’d say.
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.
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.
How the fuck can Trump just fire anyone he pleases, yet when fucking Biden was in there it seemed he couldn’t even get rid of the fucking gardner???
Because they realize that rules are just words on paper. They mean precisely nothing when the people in charge of enforcing them are the ones who are breaking them.
It used to be the people’s responsibility to hold politicians to account. Nixon didn’t resign because he felt bad - he resigned because his support collapsed. If you voted for a congressman or senator who refused to impeach Trump, you voted for making politicians above the law.
Right? They are calling on states to blatantly gerrymander their districts, which is bold-face illegal and should get them immediately removed from office.
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.
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.
MAGA is, of course, telling everyone to calm down, because it’s a “coding error”.
MAGA, of course, has no critical thinking skills, and so doesn’t question why a static document was being edited so specifically in the first place.
Shit this is the justification they need to be angry about it. “The crooked media and the dirty liberals forced me to put a bunch of stuff in the constitution that I don’t want there,” Trump will say on Truth Social, and by the next morning, reality will reflect that the Dems had to back down on the issue and, in fact, the changes Trump made are permanent.
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’ve run into far too much naked malice lately to attribute it to stupidity
