Latest news with #LibraryOfCongress
Al Jazeera
a day ago
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Have sections of the US Constitution gone missing from government website?
It didn't take long for internet sleuths to notice that something was missing on the Library of Congress website that annotates the United States Constitution. Reddit users pointed out on Wednesday that the website omitted text from some sections of Article 1, which include provisions about the right of habeas corpus as well as limits on congressional and state power. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, people found that the full text appeared on the Library of Congress website on July 17 but was missing in snapshots after that date. Some people mistakenly said President Donald Trump's administration removed these provisions from the constitution entirely without Congress's input. 'BREAKING: The official US government website has quietly removed Sections 9 and 10 of Article I from the Constitution,' one Threads post said on Wednesday. 'Let me say that again: They didn't amend the Constitution. They didn't debate it in Congress. They just erased two of the most protective sections; the ones that deal with habeas corpus, limits on federal power, and Congress's sole authority to set tariffs.' Altering the text on a website would not remove or erase sections of the constitution. It can be changed only through a formal amendment process, which begins in the US Congress, which can modify or replace existing provisions. The constitution's full text is also available on the websites for the National Archives and the nonprofit National Constitution Center. The amendment process outlined in Article 5 is the only way to alter the constitution. Any proposed amendment must first be approved by a two-thirds vote in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Then it must be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures or via state ratifying conventions. Government website omits constitution sections On Wednesday about 11am in Washington, DC (15:00 GMT), the Library of Congress posted on X that the missing sections were 'due to a coding error'. 'We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon,' the post read. The website on Wednesday also displayed a banner that said: 'The Constitution Annotated website is currently experiencing data issues. We are working to resolve this issue and regret the inconvenience.' The institution issued an update on X a few hours later that the website was fixed. 'Missing sections of the Constitution Annotated website have been restored,' it said. 'Upkeep of Constitution Annotated and other digital resources is a critical part of the Library's mission, and we appreciate the feedback that alerted us to the error and allowed us to fix it.' Article 1 establishes the federal government's legislative branch. Its missing sections included portions of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10, which largely focus on limits on congressional and state power. Before being restored, the text of Article 1 ended in Section 8, just before a line that lists Congress's ability to provide and maintain a navy. Section 9, which was temporarily deleted, details limits on congressional power. It addresses habeas corpus, the legal procedure that grants people in government custody the right to challenge their detention in court. The section says Congress may not suspend habeas corpus 'unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it'. Habeas corpus has been in the headlines during the second Trump administration. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters in May that the administration was looking into suspending habeas corpus. Later that month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrongly said habeas corpus is a right the president has to remove people from the US. Section 10, which was also temporarily removed, covers restrictions on US states, including regulating tariffs without Congress's consent. Our ruling A Threads post said an official US government website 'quietly removed Sections 9 and 10 of Article I from the Constitution' without input from Congress. On Wednesday, the Library of Congress's annotated website of the US Constitution was missing sections of Article 1. The library said the issue was related to a coding error, and it was corrected shortly afterwards. Website alterations do not affect US law or the constitution. The document can be changed only through a formal amendment process initiated by Congress. We rate this post false.
TechCrunch
2 days ago
- Politics
- TechCrunch
Library of Congress explains how parts of US Constitution vanished from its website
The Library of Congress has given a fuller explanation as to why large sections of the U.S. Constitution suddenly vanished from its official website. As TechCrunch previously reported, parts of Section 8, as well as the entirety of Section 9 and Section 10, were deleted from Article 1 of the Constitution on the U.S. government's official website over the past month. The changes to the sections, which pertained to the Congressional powers, the rights of individual states, and the rights to due process, sparked alarm at a time when the Trump administration has threatened to suspend habeas corpus. After the changes were reported, the Library of Congress tweeted that the sections were missing due to a 'coding error.' TechCrunch reached out to the Library of Congress and received more insight into the issue: 'The online Constitution Annotated is an educational tool which includes discussions of the Supreme Court's latest opinions linked to the text of the Constitution. When updating the site to reflect our constitutional scholars' analysis of the impact of the latest cases on Article I, Sections 8-10, the team inadvertently removed an XML tag,' Bill Ryan, the director of communications for the Library of Congress, told TechCrunch. 'This prevented publication of everything in Article I after the middle of Section 8. The problem has been corrected, and our updated constitutional analysis is now available. We are taking steps to prevent a recurrence in the future,' said Ryan. XML is a commonly used markup language used by the Library of Congress to format its website. A missing closing tag could plausibly result in missing text from the website, as anything outside of the tag would be ignored. The full text of the Constitution has now been reinstated on the Library of Congress's website.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Removal of parts of Constitution from Congress website raises concerns
Significant parts of the US Constitution, including sections 8, 9, and 10, were temporarily removed from the website. Notably, Section 9, which discusses the Writ of Habeas Corpus protecting against unlawful detention, was among the missing text. The disappearance prompted an online frenzy and raised concerns about transparency among the public and media outlets. The Library of Congress, which maintains the website, stated that the removal was due to a 'coding error'. The missing sections were subsequently restored to the website later the same day.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Significant parts of the Constitution were quietly removed from the Congress website
Significant parts of the Constitution were quietly removed from the Congress website but have since been restored. Multiple outlets reported Wednesday Sections 9 and 10, and a large chunk of Section 8, had vanished from the website's annotated version. Section 8 discusses the powers the Constitution gives Congress and Section 9 discusses the powers it denies to the legislative body. Section 10 discusses the powers the Constitution denies to the states. Notably, Section 9 mentions the Writ of Habeas Corpus, which protects Americans from unlawful detention. '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,' the Constitution reads. In May, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller told reporters the Trump administration is 'looking at' suspending the writ of habeas corpus for migrants under claims of an 'invasion.' The missing text sparked an online frenzy with Reddit users questioning what happened. 'They must think that removing those portions from their own site changes the constitution,' one Reddit user from the military subreddit r/Military wrote Wednesday morning. One Reddit user suggested: 'Somebody kicked a plug out of a server (edit; not literally, but somebody who was updating messed up) or somebody deliberately f***ed up.' 'This isn't a server problem- this is deliberate,' another replied. The Library of Congress said the missing text was an accident. 'It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution '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,' the library wrote on X at around 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. The White House did not give The Independent a comment when asked about the coding error. No matter the intentions behind the sections' removal, the incident 'raises serious transparency concerns,' MediasTouch News wrote in an article. The temporary glitch did not affect the validity of the laws removed from the online version of the Constitution. The Library of Congress posted shortly after 3 p.m. the missing sections had been restored. 'Upkeep of Constitution Annotated and other digital resources is a critical part of the Library's mission, and we appreciate the feedback that alerted us to the error and allowed us to fix it,' the library wrote.
The Guardian
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A privilege and a great pleasure': inside the 5,000-item Stephen Sondheim collection
Mark Horowitz had done his homework before Stephen Sondheim came to visit. He filled the room with scores by Bartók, Brahms, Copland and Rachmaninoff; manuscripts in the hand of Bernstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein. 'The last thing I brought him out was the manuscript for Gershwin's Porgy and Bess,' Horowitz recalls. 'That's when he started to cry.' The 'show and tell' of Sondheim's favourite composers, mentors and collaborators at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 1993 planted a seed. It convinced him, Horowitz believes, that his papers would be in good company at the world's biggest library. 'Shortly after that he said he was going to be changing his will and he in fact did. He sent me a printout of the paragraph in his will that left his manuscripts and things to the library.' Sondheim died in 2021 at the age of 91 and his bequest is now fulfilled. The library has acquired about 5,000 items including manuscripts, music and lyric drafts, recordings, notebooks and scrapbooks that provide an unrivalled window to the mind of the man some called the Shakespeare of musical theatre. Among them are hundreds of music and lyric sketches of Sondheim's well-known works as well as drafts of songs that were cut from shows or never made it to a production's first rehearsal. Dozens of scrapbooks hold theatre programmes, clippings and opening night telegrams. On a Tuesday afternoon, the Guardian is ushered into the library's inner sanctum for another Horowitz 'show and tell'. The senior music specialist has laid several cardboard boxes on a table, opening them to reveal sheet music and other papers graced by Sondheim's pencil. 'I love his hand, which I think is just gorgeous,' observes Horowitz, a longtime admirer and acquaintance of the winner of eight Tony awards, including a special Tony for lifetime achievement. 'This intimacy with the process is a privilege and a great pleasure.' Sitting prominently are weathered spiral notebooks documenting some of Sondheim's musical efforts while a student at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There are music exercises, tunes and early compositions like the sheet music from his college musical, Phinney's Rainbow, along with a programme from his high school musical, By George, written when he was 15. The crown jewels are manuscripts for some of Sondheim's most celebrated shows including Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, as well as lesser-known works such as his plays and screenplays. Horowitz flicks through a thick folder containing 40 pages of lyric sketches for A Little Priest, a duet where Sweeney, the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Mrs Lovett gleefully plan to dispose of his murder victims by baking their flesh into pies to sell at Mrs Lovett's failing pie shop. It uses clever wordplay and puns about professions and social classes, imagining how 31 different flavours would suit various pies. Here is a master wordsmith at work. 'One of the things he writes in the margins is lists of people who might be baked into the pies: cook, butler, page, sailor, tailor, actor, barber, driver, crier, gigolo. I went through the pages and counted them and I came up with 158 different professions that he considered as types of people.' Horowitz points to an abandoned idea: 'Somewhere on this page is rabbi and the thing I get a kick out of is that then, a few pages later, he actually turns it into a couplet: 'Everybody shaves except rabbis and riff-raff.'' Horowitz reaches into a box and produces lyric sketches for Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music, along with a one-page inner monologue written as subtext for the character Desirée when she sings it. The most popular song that Sondheim ever wrote was also one of the quickest to turn around. Horowitz explains: 'Basically in 24 hours he wrote his hit song whereas for most of his songs it took about two weeks, certainly for the longer numbers. There are 40 pages of sketches for Priest; I think there are nine pages here for Send in the Clowns. 'One of the reasons was they'd already been in rehearsal so he knew almost everything about the show and particularly about Glynis Johns and her voice. He always described it as a light, silvery voice, which was very pleasant but she couldn't sustain notes. 'He wrote it specifically for her voice. It's very short phrases, which is why they're questions. 'Isn't it rich? Are we a pair?' They cut off quickly. It was written for this character, for this place in the show, for this actress, for this voice, and knowing all that made it much easier than it would be otherwise.' The volume of work for each show seemed to increase, from three sheet music boxes for Company to nine for Sunday in the Park with George and 12 for Into the Woods. 'I don't know if it was because things got harder for him or he was more hard on himself,' Horowitz observes. 'There's no question that he was literally a genius but seeing the vast amount of perspiration in addition to the inspiration – it's one thing to be witty and clever but to see how much went into refining and making everything as perfect and specific as possible is sort of staggering.' The collection also contains materials related to Sondheim's plays and screenplays, such as draft scripts for The Last of Sheila, and a commercial he wrote for The Simpsons when he was a guest on the show. Three boxes of specialty songs include birthday songs he wrote for friends Leonard Bernstein, Hal Prince and others. There are drafts of variations on the lyrics to I'm Still Here from Follies that Sondheim wrote for the singer and actor Barbra Streisand at her request. Horowitz rummages through a folder to find a 1993 fax from Streisand listing personal traits she wanted included such as 'my name – shorten it', 'nails – too long', 'perfectionist', 'opinionated – big mouth', 'feminist', 'liberal', 'don't want to perform live'. He comments: 'She's being fairly candid here about the things that people criticise her for and suggesting he include them in what he writes.' Sondheim primarily worked with pencil and paper for his music and lyric writing, even though he was 'very computer proficient' and at one point considered writing video games. He made his first donation to the library in 1995: a vast record collection of about 13,000 albums accompanied by a hand-typed card catalogue. He also sat for a series of interviews with Horowitz in 1997. To Horowitz, who produced a 70th birthday celebration concert for Sondheim in 2000, he was the artist who made him believe that musical theatre was 'something important and something worthy of a life's study and a life's pursuit'. He was always intimidated by Sondheim in person but found him to be unfailingly kind and generous. He has fond memories of working on a production of Merrily We Roll Along at Arena Stage in Washington DC in 1990. Sondheim borrowed Horowitz's rhyming dictionary as he was writing new lyrics for some of the songs. 'When he handed it back to me, he said, 'Just so you know, I put in some missing words,' which he had in fact done.' Recalling another incident from that production, he says: 'They had just done a run through with the orchestra and he was talking in the house to the producer, who was a very intimidating fellow I did not particularly like, and one of the musicians came up and was standing by the side, waiting very patiently, but this producer whipped around and said: 'Yes, what do you want?' 'The guy said: 'I'm sorry, I was just wondering if there's going to be another run through without the orchestra so I can sit and see the show?' The producer was very dismissive and said: 'I don't know, we'll see.' Sondheim whipped around and said, 'How dare you? Do you know how lucky you are that you have a musician who cares and wants to see the show?' This guy withered a bit and it was very gratifying to me.' Horowitz credits Sondheim with changing the perception of musical theatre in academia. Previously 'looked down upon by music departments and theatre departments', Sondheim's work has led to 'an explosion of scholarship in musical theatre' because it 'is that important and that good and that serious'. The Library of Congress aims to be a one-stop shop for researchers. The Sondheim collection joins existing archives of collaborators and mentors such as Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers. Sondheim encouraged Hal Prince and Arthur Laurents to donate their collections to the library. The Jonathan Larson collection includes notes from Sondheim's feedback. Yet the precious Sondheim collection was nearly lost. In 1995, there was a fire in his home office at 246 East 49th Street in New York, where the manuscripts were kept in cardboard boxes on wooden shelves. Horowitz recalls: 'When I went back afterwards, if you lifted the manuscripts out of the boxes, there were singe marks outlining where the paper sat in the boxes. Even now, as we're going through the collection, we're finding smoke damage on the edges of manuscript. Why they didn't go up in flames, I don't know. It truly is the closest I've ever seen in my life to a miracle.'
