Internet critics are not accepting the U.S. government’s reason for removing Section 9 and Section 10 from the Constitution Annotated website.Archive searches earlier on Wednesday suggested the White House had scrubbed Sections 9 and 10 (pertaining to Habeas Corpus and judicial review of unlawful de...
While technically plausible, I bet the explanation is somewhere in the middle:
Some Trump loyalist with access to this website, perhaps inspired by internal discussions or news, deleted these sections from the databases.
…Or something like that. Other extremes (following an official order, or a massively coincidental technical accident) just feel too implausible to be true.
My working theory is in the middle between yours and what they said.
This is based on my viewing of the content in question yesterday, and my decades of experience as a software developer, including web page development.
You didn’t have to compare it to the original, it just looked wrong as it was. It looked to me like all of the content starting from Article I Section 8 until the end of Article I was all wrong. Like rendered weird and/or removed. All of a sudden, it was just a bunch of paragraphs that seemed out of place. No headings, for example.
I suspect that some MAGA was trying to change something, rather than delete all of the stuff that was deleted. Because A LOT was deleted. It can’t be a coincidence that these sections are relevant to ongoing criticisms of Trump, but not all of the deleted parts were relevant. Somebody either tried to add/edit an annotation, or they tried to edit the wording of the Constitution directly.
And I suspect that whatever method they use to store the constitution and annotations is extremely error prone. And so, let’s say that the person edited in a quotation mark ("). If the software doesn’t handle characters like that properly, something like that alone can cause problems like what I saw.
So, in that case, they could call it a “coding error” and pretend like they weren’t lying. Both the software for the website and markup for the data can be called “code”.
On top of that, government software is usually done by the lowest permitted bidder, so it’s not surprising if it is basically done by an amateur who doesn’t know how to escape characters. Finally, the incompetence of trying to edit something without reading the instructions that surely exist, and without checking the result for unintended consequences, is exactly the sort of incompetence that I expect from MAGA.
I buy that. Yeah the messed up formatting is an excellent point, I’ve messed up formatting the exact same way forgetting an end tag or something.
So you think it was a ‘hacker’ or an external govt employee? Or someone internal to the dept that tried to do something that stupid?
I guess it could be either…
I’d go by Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I feel like there should be an addendum called Trump’s razor: if there’s a possible explanation that’s both malicious AND stupid, it’s probably the correct one. Your previous theory would fit.
I was thinking the same. tRump’s Razor starts as malice and, through sheer incompetence, becomes stupid.
i’ve run into far too much naked malice lately to attribute it to stupidity
In that case, it would not be adequately explained as stupidity.