Politics Please say rock bottom is getting close

Congress Just Deleted Habeas Corpus From The Constitution On Its Website

Pop quiz: how many sections does Article I of the Constitution have? If you choose to look it up on the official website of Congress, congress.gov, because you don’t want to trust not some sketchy Substack for sedition hobbyists, you’d say it has eight. Except it has ten. Congress has just deleted Section 9 (and 10) from the website where it maintains the “Constitution Annotated” as a public service. But it’s gone now. Because the sketchy sedition hobbyists are the ones running Congress now.

We may need Nicholas Cage to steal the paper copy of the Constitution before it gets the Wite-Out treatment too.

Section 9 includes eight different clauses, but likely the most relevant to the Republican leadership is the right of habeas corpus. “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,” reads the Constitution. At least the copy maintained by the non-profit National Constitution Center reads that way, because the congressional version skips it entirely. The Trump administration struggles mightily with habeas corpus, the provision descended from English legal tradition that gives people the government locks up — or exports to El Salvadoran torture camps — the right to force the government to explain why. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem famously floundered when asked to define the right, but next time she won’t have to worry because Congress shot it down like a rambunctious puppy.

And it’s just gone… the copy jumps directly from the end of Section 8 to Article II. [UPDATE: I was working quickly and didn’t even focus on the semicolon there. The deletions actually start before the end of Section 8.]


The website is an annotated copy so there are separate URLs for landing pages digging into the meaning of each section. If you try to manually override the URL to see what it says about the missing Section 9, you get this:


The good news for Justice Sam Alito is that Section 9 is also the part of the Constitution that bars anyone holding office from accepting a title. So Sir Samuel of Blackacre can now fully enjoy his medieval European knighthood while continuing to collect under-the-table luxury benefits!

The quiet deletion of constitutional protections from the government’s official website marks a bold step into Orwellian fanfic. It’s a move Trump telegraphed last year, when he released his personal Trump Bible, promising his fans a King James Bible and copies of America’s foundational documents… minus the parts he doesn’t like. The Fourteenth Amendment? That thing with Equal Protection and birthright citizenship and banning insurrectionists from office? NO THANK YOU! When his own “Little Red Book” — hawked to supporters for $60 a pop — edited out the parts of the Constitution that didn’t fit his vibe, many rolled their eyes. But it was already an assault on the rule of law, with MAGA officials attempting to force his FrankenBible into schools as an educational text. American civics with the Reconstruction stuff neatly removed.

In retrospect, the exclusion of the Twenty-Second Amendment might have been a red flag too.

But erasing laws in a privately published book is one thing. Congress removing inconvenient laws is another. Of course, removing it from the website doesn’t actually change the law. The Supreme Court — presumably — would still refer to their previously published pocket Constitutions. It’s not really about changing the law though, it’s about laying groundwork. Someone is going to go on cable news and declare “I don’t know what these hippies are talking about, habeas is not in the Constitution, look here!” and they will go completely unchallenged. Make America Not Understand Rights Again is a goal.

As I write this, I keep refreshing the congress.gov site hoping that it will reappear. Hoping that this is some sort of glitch or accident caused by a DOGE intern spilling on the keyboard. It’s not coming back, though.

“Trump Derangement Syndrome” is such a powerful gaslighting trope because Trump’s clumsy, ramshackle oafishness is a feature and not a bug. Authoritarianism via amateurism. A Nixonian power grab raises hackles, but bumble along embracing the stupidest fascism cosplay and one of two things happens: (1) you get away with it because the Supreme Court gave up on the rule of law or (2) you get called out and play it off as a joke that critics are “crazy” for taking so seriously. If enough people call out Congress for this, it’s going to be “a harmless oversight” and purely coincidental that their version of the Constitution excludes the part that makes dictatorships slightly harder.

Oh, and you should watch out for bills of attainder and ex post facto laws too. Because that’s also in Section 9.

UPDATE: The Library of Congress blames a “coding error.”


As a reminder, the Librarian of Congress was fired by the Trump administration and replaced by two-bit stooge Todd Blanche. To be clear, the person currently running the Library of Congress is… THE GUY FROM DOJ WHO KEEPS LOSING HABEAS CASES. Surely a coincidence.

Blanche has, of course, been busy trying to smooth over a story with Ghislaine Maxwell that could get her better prison accommodations in exchange for saying “Donald Trump who?” when asked about Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking operation. So Blanche can be forgiven for being asleep at the switch at the Library!

But as 404 Media insightfully points out, this isn’t exactly a dynamic section of the website. For years no one has even touched it. The thing about a coding error is it requires someone messing with the coding in the first place. So who was that? And why?

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/08/con...-corpus-from-the-constitution-on-its-website/

 

Ohio requires buses for private school kids. Public school students have to find their own ride
School districts are responsible for transporting private and charter school kids, leaving thousands of public school students behind


For about 2,000 students attending high school in Dayton, Ohio, there won’t be a bus in sight when they walk out the door for the beginning of the school year this week.

Ruben Castillo, an 11th grade student at Meadowdale Career Technology Center, is one of them.

Ohio law means that public school districts such as Dayton’s are responsible for transporting students who attend private and charter schools. When they fail to do so, they risk fines of millions of dollars.

A shortage of drivers and buses combined with the threat of fines, means that public school districts in Dayton and around Ohio find themselves relegating their own students to the back of the transportation line.

“I’m going to have to use Uber, and it’s going to cost me $25-$30 a day to get to and from school,” says Castillo. “In wintertime, when demand is higher, it’s probably going to be more.” At 180 school days over the course of a year, that’s thousands of dollars he is set to fork out from his own pocket.

For the past several years, school administrators in Dayton, Cincinnati and elsewhere have been trying to get around the problem by issuing students with bus passes for public transportation.


But children riding public buses have reported being subjected to a variety of dangers. Public transportation administrators have also reported difficulties trying to serve the public and thousands of students all at once.

The situation came to a tragic head on the morning of 4 April when 18-year-old Alfred Hale III was shot dead at the public bus hub in downtown Dayton while en route to class at Dunbar high school. Shortly after Hale’s killing, Ohio lawmakers introduced a law making it illegal for Dayton public schools (DPS) to buy public bus vouchers for students.

The burden of getting children to school now falls on students’ parents, grandparents, local churches and charities, say officials. Families who choose to continue to have their students use public buses to get to and from school will have to fork out at least $540 per high school student a year.

“There seems to be an aggressive approach to the most vulnerable families and people in America,” says DPS’s superintendent, David Lawrence.

“Not only is it unfair, it’s onerous that public schools have to provide transportation to non-public school students.”

What’s happening in Ohio is a result of a wider effort by conservative politicians to push for more children to attend charter and private schools, many of which are run by religious organizations.


Republican politicians hold a supermajority across Ohio’s legislature and have built up a $1bn fund in the form of vouchers for families who want to send their students to private and charter schools.

Ohio is not alone.

Republican-dominated state legislatures have been pushing for or have already enacted laws that see billions of dollars of taxpayer money directed to funding private school voucher systems in Texas, Florida, Iowa, Tennessee and elsewhere.

In Pennsylvania and Minnesota, where political control is largely split between Democrats and Republicans, public schools are required to provide transportation for students attending non-public schools. In January, Donald Trump signed an executive order steering taxpayer funds from public schools to private schools.

Many in Democratic-leaning cities say they are being targeted.

In Cincinnati, children as young as 13 are being forced to use public transportation to get to and from school due to funding shortages that this year will see more than 100 yellow bus routes cut.

In Columbus, where more than half of all students are African American, the public school system is required to bus students of 162 private and charter schools.

About 1.8 million, or 80%, of all school-going students in Ohio attend public schools and nearly two-thirds of students attending Dayton public schools are African American. In July, the state passed a budget that saw the smallest increase in spending on K-12 public education in more than a decade.

“It’s simple – if we did not have to bus non-public school students on our transportation, we could transport every single one of our K-12 students on yellow buses,” says Jocelyn Rhynard, a member of the Dayton public school board. DPS transports between 4,000 and 5,000 charter and private school students every school day.

“It’s a direct result of the legislation from the extremist Republicans at the Ohio statehouse mandating that we must transport non-public students as well as public students in our district.”


But Republican politicians disagree.

“We had an 18-year-old get shot and killed. The environment for the students is not good down there. The NAACP interviewed the children, they don’t want to ride the public transportation buses, they want to ride the yellow school buses,” says Phil Plummer, a Republican party state representative who spearheaded the budget amendment banning DPS from giving its students public bus vouchers.

Plummer says he and others “found 25 school buses” that DPS could purchase. “They decided not to transport their kids,” he says.

DPS administrators, who pay drivers the highest rates in the region, say about 70 buses would be required to meet the need, a number that could take up to two years to procure. Lawrence says the process of buying buses and training drivers is not simple.

“It’s an 18-month cycle. [Buses] are $150,000 to $190,000 each to buy, and ones with backup cameras and air conditioning are [even] more expensive. Then drivers have to take at least 10 tests before they become fully qualified,” he says.

With the law coming into effect just months before the new school year, parents, students and public school managers have been left in a difficult situation.

“I’m a single dad raising two kids on my own. We all have to be at school at the same time. That’s a big dilemma,” says William Johnson, an educator at DPS whose daughter is no longer able to get to school using a bus provided by or paid for the district.

“I’m lucky that my 80-year-old father is going to help out taking them to school. But I ask the state [politicians] – please come up with a solution. We’re going to lose a whole generation of kids if this continues.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/11/ohio-private-charter-school-buses