Inconvenient parts of the Constitution removed from Library of Congress website

[Diraven]

I just saw a rumor online that appears to be true. Apparently someone has removed Section 9 and 10 of Article 1 from the official text of the US Constitution hosted by our government on congress.gov.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/

Section 9, of course contains the Emoluments Clause, which the Republican Congress and Supreme Court has chosen to completely ignore as it pertains to Trump.

Section 10 states that only Congress can impose tariffs.

So it looks like they're not even going to bother with amendments anymore. They can just erase the parts of the Constitution they don't like and pretend they never existed.

Edit: changed title to clarify this is the Library of Congress website.

[MrWowWow]

1. Was this govt. site hacked or

was it legally altered?

[Ocelot II]

2. That's very strange. Those sections haven't been removed from other .gov sites, though.

The Senate still has them, https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-constitution/constitution.htm#a1 and so does the National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript and the govinfo site, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CONAN-2022/pdf/GPO-CONAN-2022.pdf

Considering how generally sloppy and incompetent the Trump regime is at all levels, it could be that a minion, probably some teenaged nepobaby who got a summer job working on the Congress web site, just cut off the last two sections of Article I because they didn't fit on the page and the kid didn't want to bother to reformat it.

[nilram]

9. It was there 2 weeks ago.

Archive.org on July 27, 2025, thirteen days ago. It's completely there.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250725172744/https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/

There's no change in formatting between the archive.org version and the one on the website currently.

And, if you know how, you can inspect the data coming back from the website with your browser. In the HTTP response for https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/, the response field for Last-Modified is "Tue, 05 Aug 2025 21:07:33 GMT". No other part of the page has been modified since before that. The .css files haven't been changed since before April and it's implausible beyond belief that reformatting would not have changed them. IMO, anyway.

[Eliot Rosewater]

3. America is gone

[B.See]

14. In many respects, yes.

[SunSeeker]

4. WTF

[Ocelot II]

5. On further examination, it appears that this is part of the Library of Congress' website,

not that of the Congress itself, or at least it's created or managed by the Library. I was also able to find a reference to Section 9 by doing a term search for "bill of attainder" in the annotation section, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-1/ALDE_00000242/['Bill',%20'of',%20'Attainder'] So I think it's probably a fuckup, not a deliberate attempt to erase parts of the Constitution. I might try to find an email address to inquire about it.

Added: I did find a way to contact them, so I sent off an email inquiring about what happened to sections 9 and 10. I should get a response in about 5 business days.

[Diraven]

6. Thanks!

I edited the title to reflect this

[Foolacious]

8. They also lost the latter part of section 8. N/T

[nilram]

10. Thanks for sending off a query.

Looking at the underlying website data (cf, my prior response), I'm more inclined to think it's deliberate.

[riversedge]

17. Thanks

[Lulu KC]

7. What?

What next?

[B.See]

15. The Voting Rights Act:

The Supreme Court Prepares to End Voting Rights As We Know It - Mother Jones And they don’t want you to notice.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to hide what you are doing in Washington, announce it on a Friday evening in the heat of August. Better yet, in place of clarity, reference some pages in another document, so that people have to track that down and read it in order to grasp what you are telling them.

That is precisely what the Supreme Court did last week. But the news is too staggering to hide for long: The Republican-appointed justices have decided it is time to fully destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

[Lulu KC]

16. Yup

You got it.

[BoRaGard]

11. Sneaky anti-American republicons are a plague upon the nation

[SickOfTheOnePct]

12. The Emoluments clause that pertains to the President is still on the website

Article II, section 1, Clause 7

But yeah, it's odd about the sections missing from Article I

[intheflow]

13. "Four legs good, two legs better."

Gaslighting in real time. Fuckers.

[mackdaddy]

18. Anybody check if section 4 of the 25th Amendment is still there?

How to remove an incompetent President sounds like something to disappear down the Memory Hole.

And that 22 amendment to limit the president to two terms. Never happened....

Have you never heard of the 'Mandela Effect'?