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Last week’s headline was arresting:

“Key sections of the US Constitution deleted from government’s website.”

Those key sections, we learned, included “a key legal provision relating to habeas corpus, which protects citizens from unlawful detention.”

Similar headlines arrived rapid-fire in my various newsfeeds. Friends texted the news, which — no kidding — had a distinctly sinister tone.

Following the link-trail provided by the news stories, I called up a version of the Constitution saved in the invaluable Internet Archive and compared it with the one displayed on Congress.gov.  Sure enough, the congressional version had dropped a chunk of Article I, enumerating the powers of Congress. That missing chunk did indeed include language on habeas corpus.

But the deletion also lopped off creation of the navy, the first clue that maybe, whatever happened lacked a certain strategic nuance. Upon further examination, the display of the individual article, with analysis, was intact.

Sure enough, explanations eventually followed: a coding error at the Library of Congress had produced the frenzy. It has since been corrected.

In another time, some missing text from one display of the Constitution might have prompted little more than some messages saying, “Hey — fix your website.” But it’s 2025, and the hair-trigger response reflects the nation’s profound changes in governance.

Of course, the lesson we should have been learning is you don’t have to change the language in the Constitution; you can just ignore it. Some provisions have been gathering dust for some time, eschewed for expediency. But the scalpel has given way to the machete, and now the Constitution is no longer a useful owner’s manual of the United States.

When I studied Latin in high school, I saw it as a valuable intellectual exercise, even if it didn’t have much practical use. I wonder if students of constitutional law now have the same feeling.