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Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

I would have to imagine this is an accident or rogue vandalism -- I don't think USGOV is trying to stealth-edit the constitution by truncating the last 18 paragraphs of Article I.

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Why not? Congress is meant to be a check on the other branches of government (though the filibuster rule / partisan omnibus bill system has degraded its collective will, which is why they won't do anything), so pre-emptively removing the powers of congress from the list sounds like a power grab. It's not like it's something completely irrelevant. Same for the limitations of government listed there.

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.

One can imagine the DOGE staffers high-fiving each other as they pushed this change.

Maybe they didn’t find any meaningful waste with their random Python scripts, but at least they got to own the libs.

Because this is a government website and not the actual constitution. It's absurd. This is just not how any of this works.

this is like when groups say they "hacked the CIA"

Power is power when it is exercised, and power can be exercised when people think you have the power. Overly formalizing things and ignoring how they play out is why congress is today a dysfunctional body, for example. See also here for an example in practice https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/dead-letter-live-...

you should check what the removed sections contain.

I could see an intern or staffer trying to protest violations of habeus corpus by doing this, I guess. gets more eyes on it

who do you think is staffing the current regime

Considering that only the last part of one article is missing it really looks like a bug.

Agree. And most of us would immediately assume that if it were any other administration.

Then you should wonder how objective you can be, and why not.

I do all the time — and I have concluded that the current administration has done themselves no favors whatsoever in this regard. I really can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt and I think it's on them.

I'm guessing there's something strange about the whole site, because not only are the remaining clauses of Article 1 Section 8 missing (and section 9 and 10), so are all the annotations. The structure shows up in search engines, but the website gives 404s.

Of course. But it gave a lot of people their outrage of the day, so that's good.

this constant skepticism, where does it come from? Does Donald Trump have to come knock on your door personally and say "Hey I'm a fascist dictator!" for you to believe your eyes what the presidency is so obviously doing day in and day out? Did you not notice when they illegally swept up 200 men who had tattoos, claimed they were gang members, and sent them off to a foreign prison in direct violation of court orders? That was like "ah woke judges, tattoos are clearly incriminating..." When they tackled and handcuffed a US SENATOR for interrupting a department head that HE IS IN CHARGE FOR OVERSIGHT OF?

This is the part I'm trying to understand. What is the threshold for the skeptics?

What you see as skepticism, others see as Hanlon's Razor[0]. The prevailing wind of incompetence has masked a lot of what you might rightly consider malice, but in holding to a certain decorum or "wishing the best of people" there is a lot that could just be bungling.

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

Like the person you are responding too ... at what point does Hanlon's Razor become dull?

Note that malice and stupidity are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

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.

The motivation does not matter. It is the effect that matters, and also, it is well documented [1] that fascist dictatorships rely (again not in any pre-planned way, simply in how they emerge) on incompetence, sloppiness to achieve their end result - both to allow for wanton destruction, as well as to actually continue making people think none of this is intentional, as we are seeing here. That is, the skepticism we see here is the fascist playbook working as designed.

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...

>If it stays up and does not get restored, that's also "incompetence, laziness" but it's also the effect of increased fascism.

What if it gets restored in a matter of hours, like it has?

Because they are always testing what they can get away with

So the rational explanation is somewhere along the lines of "someone ordered to remove a small section of the constitution of the US off a government website (not all of them) and monitored the response (through social media, I guess?) and then, when they confirmed it had been noticed, rolled it back" all of it having no actual legal effect whatsoever, because they are just testing the waters?

No the explanation is "create a culture of lawlessness and impunity, fill all positions with wildly unqualified and incompetent people, rev them up to 1000 with MAGA entitlement, and let them all go loose. Whatever becomes too hot in the press, ok fix that part but keep going "

That's it , that's all it is . Pour plenty of cocaine and ketamine into the machine to keep it moving smoothly.

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