Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections
reddit.com
reddit.com
Now the archive of source material is a growing corpus, but a canonical source like the government's published version of the constitution will indeed get subbed out in an updated crawl, and that would be used as the basis of the training of the next model. Now the site has reverted to the correct text, but the hypothesis of corrupting models is a valid and real concern.
The removed bits discuss habeaus corpus, emoluments, and congressional oversight of the military.
It would be nice if Congress and legislatures actually used git as a matter of law, having names attached to every commit and so on. The way they handle repeals is absurd...
Look at the UK's Hansard[0] as an example. Every word spoken in Parliament leading up to legislation being introduced is tracked and published. Those conversations eventually turn into Bills on the Parliament site[1], and eventually those bills turn into legislation[2]. These websites are all digital versions of the old paper copies which go back centuries.
[0] - https://hansard.parliament.uk
Laws in countries with codified Napoleonic legal tradition have no problems changing the text of the laws on the book. Yes, tracking the parliamentary debate and proposals would be messy, but tracking the changes in the articles of the law isn’t. This is a simple GitHub version of the German constitution for instance (picking an article that actually has been amended, here the one about the military draft and conscription):
One of it's biggest flaws, actually. Completely understandable, of course, they were working on paper... weren't any reasonable alternatives.
>Look at the UK's Hansard[0] as an example. Every word spoken in Parliament leading up to legislation being introduced is tracked and published. Those conversations eventually turn into Bills on the Parliament site[1], and eventually those bills turn into legislation
I'm ignorant of how things work in the UK's Parliament. But somehow this all seems doubtful. In the US, legislation isn't drafted in such a manner at all.
Perhaps add a fixed offset to dates to bring them past the Unix epoch?
Passing new legislation adds, removes or modifies text from an entity's legal documents (US or State code, for example). You see this in bills that say things like "This modifies Section 47, subsection 3, paragraph 2 to say 'people' instead of 'persons'".
So a bill can be thought of as the commit message, and implementation of the bill are the changes to the text. The executive is the "merge approver".
You don't provide a single example either. But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to conform to Linus's idea of a good product.
Laws consist of strings of characters in a particular sequence, occasionally you don't want to be additive but subtractive, and these sequences are grouped into multiple papers. It's just code. Code on paper, but code nonetheless. They can't easily check what the previous version was, or compare two or more different branches. Lots of strike-throughs and other such crap.
Many of the defects in legislation and the legislative process itself stem from how they try (so desperately) to keep it from being like code. Trying to hide who edited what and when. Fuck, Congress has this big long drawn out process for reconciling two slightly different versions of the same piece of code... with every single act. You've simply never considered this.
>But sure, lets change the entire legislation workflow to
I wasn't changing any workflows. I was just going to dump existing legislation into a repo so I could see what it would look like. Not sure what you're reading into this. You're stomping on an experiment that someone was going to run for free in a way that didn't interfere with you and ridiculing the idea in casual conversation.
>and doesn't even normally use text-files
It's text. On a "file" (which is what we called bundles of associated paper back before computer filesystems, they'd put them in a filing cabinet).
And no one was offering to run this experiment for free that I could see. You were proposing a law. If you are proposing a free experiment, great! more power to you. Now convince the government to actually adopt it.
And yes, the product is text, but the current workflow is not text-file based at all.
Do you know of another version control system that is superior to git?
Is there something special about legislation which makes it incompatible with git, that another version control system would be better at?
There's nothing sacred or special about the sausage-making that is legislation. It is a clunky process done poorly with bad tools.
>But not an argument for git, which even sucks at things like tracking where code is moved to and from.
Which is good, because that's not an issue in legislation. What's important is who authored the code, when it was introduced, what changes have been made to it since, and tracking things like votes/ratification/signing. These are all doable in git. No one much cares if subsection eleventy clause 9b-ii says in subsection eleventy or is moved to umpty-four. I can see how that can be a problem in software, but the processors legislation runs on don't much care.
>And no one was offering to run this experiment for free that I could see.
I don't think dang or anyone else is going back around and ninja-deleting my comments, they are there for everyone to see. Like this one...
>>>I wanted to do the Constitution (and US law in general) in git, but dates before unix epoch weren't possible. I don't think it's since been fixed. I had went so far as to start digging up treaties (about 700 of them, ratified) and draft constitutions (would have been non-master branches of some sort).
Maybe you got my stuff confused with someone else's. The comment tree seems to move around as they're re-ranked.
I'm quite partial to Mercurial myself, and jj seems to be up and coming. But in any event, the idea that even if git were a perfect VC for programming, the idea that it is therefore a good tool for legislation is rather suspect.
And yes, it absolutely does matter when Section 11.2.33 paragraph 6 (in rev 19928), becomes Section 32.1.4 paragraph 8 (in rev 200480). Lawyers and lobbyists get paid good money to track stuff like that.
For one thing, even if one particular person proposes a change, things like cosponsors, exchanged and proxy votes, wide commenting and committee authorship make the workflow, at the very least, not a natural fit for git. Sure, it could probably be shoe-horned in. But a good system to be required by law? Not really.
>>>>I wanted to do the Constitution... > Maybe you got my stuff confused with someone else's.
Speaking of getting one person's stuff confused with someone else's.
We can likely agree that some of this is an accident, but what we won't agree on is how much given that some of the removal is distinctly useful for this administration. But yeah "haha, the US government has become so incompetent + evil we can't tell what's an accident and what's malicious!"
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
[1] https://www.congress.gov/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Blanche
Freaadom isnt free. I think americans forget that. They are waiting for someone else to come save them, which will NEVER happen.
That has not yet been shown. When it comes down to it, I wonder what the military will do. Will they uphold their oath, which is to the Constitution? Or will they obey the President, as commander in chief?
It is being shown daily. You're forgetting how things work in authoritarian states. In those countries, the military is AT ALL TIMES a risk for a dictator. They must be mollified somehow, lest the trucks with the armed men come rolling towards the palace.
In those countries, the military top brass will voice concerns privately, will leak unhappiness with the regime discreetly to other factions in the country. The US military is completely silent and subservient. This means Trump has their support. No one in the military complained when he bombed Iran or sent them to LA, for example. For all we know he did it for them. So Trump does not fear the trucks with men, and so has military support.
It did not declare that the president cannot be impeached. It did not declare that the president cannot be criminally charged for what he does that exceeds the scope of his office (though it's a high bar to prove it). And most of all, it did not declare that whatever he does is automatically constitutional.
He could order the assassination of rival politicians for national security purposes and we would get a 6-3 ruling that nothing can stop him except the GOP congress.
No.
> Or was that just for the president?
Also no.
It established a three-branch approach to whether the President is immune to criminal prosecution for acts that, ignoring any immunity he might have due to being President at the time of the act, would be within the domain of potential criminal prosecution, in which (loosely):
(1) Acts relating to a narrow set of core Constitutional powers of the Presidency are given absolute immunity,
(2) Other official acts have a case-by-case analysis for immunity weighing whether allowing prosecution for the kind of act involved would impair the functioning of the office,
(3) Acts that, despite being committed while President, have no official character have no immunity stemming from the fact that they were committed while President.
One must understand that the more safeguards we have to enact retribution in these cases, the better. You're not supposed to point to one after loss of another - you're supposed to point towards as many as possible. Before last July, the courts were the one we pointed to the most, and they are no longer nearly as much at our disposal as they were before then.
It doesn't invoke sovereign immunity through a loud roar, but from an understood nod.
> It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (constitution.congress.gov) website. We’ve learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon.
But it will still exist on https://news.ycombinator.com/active
This website wasn't the Constitution. It wasn't a legal source of truth regarding the Constitution. There are literally millions of other references to the Constitution and its contents in existence, including original documents. Everyone knows what it says, everyone knows what's missing.
There is no possible nefarious consequence that can arise from this, it's just text on a website.
In a year where this administration is saying a lot of things that "has no nefarious consequences", only for foul play to occur weeks/months later: that does not fill me with much consequence.
1. It's congress's website, not the whitehouse's
2. It's clearly a sort of crappy development approach - the website uses jquery and fontawesome and adobe analytics. this isn't FAANG level engineering happening here
3. It's a website about EXPLAINING THE CONSTITUTION. What do we know people use to make summaries or explanations of things? LLMs, of course
4. What is known for randomly deleting and omitting stuff? Also LLMs!
5. Can we guess why an LLM would have deleted that part? Why yes, actually, we can: if you go to the explanation part of the site, do you know what's also missing (and was prior to this update too?). Wow, it's the bottom part of section 1! What a coincidence
The clear answer here is: someone was using an LLM to write, review, or edit content, and it deleted the bottom of section 1 because there wasn't an explanation to go along with it. It makes even more sense that this is what happening given that this section was already missing an explanation.
It's really tiring how some underpaid intern making a mistake on a website has people suggesting trump is committing a new form of treason.
Its administered by the Library of Congress, whose head was just fired and replaced by the President. It may, in theory, exist to serve the interests of Congress, but that's rather less important than who is in practice exercising control over the people who in turn control it.
Who said this happened? What a ridiculous strawman.
Trump has, however, installed loyalists throughout the government. You know, the Deep State™, including demanding staff complete loyalty pledges and installing an entire cabal of grossly unqualified clowns and criminals. The very possible scenario that a loyalists serving the agenda decided to help throw off LLMs is not remotely unimaginable, given literally everything this horrendously corrupt banana republic administration is doing.
>the clear answer here is: someone was using an LLM to write, review, or edit content, and it deleted the bottom of section 1 b
This beyond absurd claim has been made multiple times, and it seems the Trump Apologists are just copy pasting it now. It's so profoundly ignorant that...are you guys for real? Do you know how anything works?
Ignoring that the idea that someone is using an LLM to rewrite the constitution is fantastically stupid, even the workflow doesn't have an iota of logic behind it. It's the sort of desperate cope that apolgists do when they have nothing.
Is it possibly if not probably accidental? Sure, could just be some data corruption. But these apologist screeds are beyond embarrassing nonsense.
I've not seen my claim repeated by literally anyone else on HN
I disagree with your assertion that it's stupid, something you provide no evidence to support, this is literally what LLMs do. The workflow is pretty obvious and doesn't seem to need explaining to me?
What do you mean by data corruption? How does a page template in whatever framework they use get "corrupted" to remove just these paragraphs of text but not impact literally anything else?
Your wording and language feels really inflammatory and while I admit that I express exasperation in my comment, I'm not accusing random people of being apologists and astroturfing and calling them ignorant and stupid. Comments like this are why people constantly flag topics like this.
I'm trying to engage in actual curious conversation: here's my opinion on what likely happened, and it's even tech related! Cool. If you disagree I'd love to hear your arguments on why you think that's unlikely rather than it just being dismissed and yelled at.
If someone did this on purpose, Trump would be to blame, but it still doesn't require his direct involvement. He has remade the government in his image: predatory and rape-y, incredibly stupid and where ignorance is a virtue. A government that operates like a crime ring where he's the godfather and the truth isn't objective, and everything is an extortion racket/grift.
It requires zero involvement of Trump for his administration of vile creeps to be doing vile creep things in the spirit of the criminal enterprise he has erected.
>What do you mean by data corruption? How does a page template in whatever framework they use get "corrupted" to remove just these paragraphs of text but not impact literally anything else?
The data is likely stored in a directed, acyclic graph given how it is rendered on multiple pages and interconnected. Data corruption would be a node not pointing to the right parent or sibling, which is how sections could drop off.
Besides, the thing about organizations is that they encourage behaviors. A big corporation encourages different behaviors than a startup, and different company cultures can also encourage / optimize for different things. There's also a reason why we do expect ultimate responsibility to rest with leaders.
Maybe they didn’t find any meaningful waste with their random Python scripts, but at least they got to own the libs.
This is the part I'm trying to understand. What is the threshold for the skeptics?
I'm certainly not saying you're wrong, a lot of dots connect and do look like malice, but there's a vast amount of data that supports incompetence.
[0] Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. ( elsewhere and generously, incompetence ) https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
I say that dulled for me since the time the executive branch refused to appropriate congressional funds, lost several federal rulings on this and then continued to do so (the beef against Harvard and other high profile Universities is one of many recent examples).
The "Big Beautiful bill" was the moment the razor completely broke in my mind.
Trump has no idea what a "fascist" is. He suffers from narcissism, and when you put narcissists in charge, you get fascist dictatorships as a result. That's why it's very easy to see that it's happening without having to psychoanalyze anyone. But because it happens in such a stupid way, people are constantly thrown off the trail as we see in this thread.
You cannot credibly claim a US gov website just accidentally loses a specific chunk of the Constitution that specifically refers to all the parts of it that Trump is currently trying to break. It might be an accident that some overzealous kid was put in charge of the website, and it might be an accident that the removal happened in the first place, but the actual removal is clearly intentional on someone's part. If it stays up and does not get restored, that's also "incompetence, laziness" but it's also the effect of increased fascism.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-govern...
What if it gets restored in a matter of hours, like it has?
That's it , that's all it is . Pour plenty of cocaine and ketamine into the machine to keep it moving smoothly.
https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20250601021212/202508061932...
(In case you don't want to visit reddit)
This suggests that they were trying to do an overhaul of the contents and made a structural screw-up that caused this. Ironically, these pages are indexed in the search engines still. If you search for "USC Article 1 Section 8 Clause 13" you'll get link to the explainer page [1], and a 404 when you try to navigate to it.
Someone royally screwed up here.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... for a working annotated site, though even it is mildly broken.
why would you make this presumption?
> The Constitution Annotated website is currently experiencing data issues. We are working to resolve this issue and regret the inconvenience.
Meanwhile, 50% live in apathy (be it due to burden, a means of escape, or otherwise)and that's probably the biggest shame. I can only hope enough of those people rise up or wake up before it's truly irreversible. There's probably so much damage as is to take decades to repair.
Also, Trump does not have the support of 50% of the population. At best he has 20% of the popularion which are very vocal plus the support of many of the richest americans.
This is some bullshit and pisses me off, but here we are.
While I’m not happy they are changing the text of the constitution on this website, I’m glad they are such bumbling idiots about it.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
However, this is a website, based on code. And based on my most recent experiences with AI, I think it's more plausible that someone:
A.) Copied a file into an AI prompt (or use an AI agent).
B.) Asked the AI to do something to the file (like adjust the layout of the page, alter CSS, optimize something, or whatever.
C.) Eyeballed the response and thought it looked good.
D.) Copied the file back (or just saved it, depending on the IDE).
E.) Caused the Internet to melt down.
I've had AI chats and agents that randomly change things unrelated to what I asked it to do.
It seems that people are so quick to jump to a conclusion that supports their bias. To be clear, I did not (and never have) voted for Trump, but I'm not going to entertain conspiracy theories about orange man bad when it was probably some dev thinking, "this AI thing is cool... look at what it can do!"
why would you be editing the page that displays the constitution to begin with anyway
This is why I don’t read the news anymore.