World’s Most On-the-Nose ‘Coding Error’ Erases Some Rather Critical Bits of the Constitution

By Dave Levitan | August 6, 2025 | 1:02pm

Photo via National Archives/Wikimedia Commons

Trump Administration The Constitution

World’s Most On-the-Nose ‘Coding Error’ Erases Some Rather Critical Bits of the Constitution

The current president’s relationship to the US Constitution is, at best, a rocky one. He likely doesn’t know much of what’s in there, and doesn’t much care about the parts he is in fact aware of; two of the most glaring examples of his attempts to shred the founding document in these last six months or so involve habeas corpus — ICE’s disappearances of hundreds of people to El Salvador or elsewhere, among other violations — and the emoluments clause — the list is long, but let’s start with the billion-dollar jet he gets to keep.

Lo and behold, a Trumpian miracle: the actual text of the Constitution, as hosted by the Library of Congress’s website, suddenly seemed to no longer include those very sections. Sections 9 and 10 of the document’s Article 1 simply vanished. “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” — gone.

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“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” — poof. What wonders this world can produce!

The Library of Congress, confronted with this discrepancy, said that the missing text was not nefarious, was in fact due to a “coding error,” whatever that might mean. “We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon.”

To be sure, while it is odd that these particular bits of the Constitution, long hosted on their site without incident, would disappear just as the president continues to make a mockery of their meaning, it does perhaps stretch the imagination that someone might have done this on purpose. After all, there are plenty of other places where one can read the full and unaltered text of the document, and while it is unwise these days to ascribe a potential bridge-too-far for the Supreme Court it does not seem likely that our friendly Originalist Justices would manage a “well, if it’s not in there, it doesn’t count anymore” sort of argument. Also, at first it was not just sections 9 and 10 — the missing text actually began halfway through section 8, meaning under this new version Congress has been granted the power to “raise and support Armies” but not to “provide and maintain a Navy.”

Later on Wednesday some — but not all — of that section returned. For now one must assume good faith on the part of the Library, and accept that sometimes these things happen, and the reappeared text — which does not, as of this writing, include the bits that would theoretically stop the president from arresting people for nothing and sending them to foreign gulags, or the bits designed to stop an executive from sweatily enriching himself through the use of his office — will grow until the nation’s most important document is made whole. Until the next coding error.