Edit: as pointed out in a comment below, the official cause is coding error
Compare with the original, from a few weeks back
Half of section 8, governing Congressional power over the military is removed.
Section 9 had, among other things:
- Habeas Corpus the right to get a court hearing instead of arbitrary imprisonment
- a ban on foreign emoluments for the US officials (eg: payments from foreign governments)
Section 10 reserved foreign policy for the federal government instead of the states.
For a non US and non Lawyer. What exactly does this mean? What safefuards does this remove?
So the constitution is the foundational legal document in the US, determining the powers of each part of government. If they actually stripped out these parts, it would mean no oversight over the military for Congress, no right to go to court to contest an unjust imprisonment, and no restrictions on payments by foreign governments to US officials among other things.
It was either a coding error, as the Library of Congress is saying or a really ham-handed way to announce an additional step towards dictatorship, which are now being walked back as too outrageous, using a the pretext of a coding error as a way to save face. I doubt we’ll ever find out which.
Thanks for the thorough explanation! I’m wishing you all the best from across the Pond, I sadly think you have some really hard years ahead of you.
It has no real impact other than on people sourcing this web page for accurate information.
The Constitution is still a founding document and changes to the text on a web page have no actual impact on it as written.
The lack of standardization and the confusion would be the point. Get enough confusion to get the people who would enforce it clamoring over the right order and way to do it and then you can bully your way past it while they squabble.
What matters is how we enforce our rules in the current and that doesnt matter what a document does or does not say but how people act.
Thank you! Hopefully it stays that way