Yesterday was the 230th birthday of the U.S. Constitution, signed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. More than a hundred years ago, Congress ordered its Library to publish an annotated Constitution that explains that important document. Each edition, starting in 1913, records how our founding document has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, with new print volumes published each decade and updates published every two years.
One hundred years later, after a lot of prodding (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) from us, a 2009 letter from Sen. Feingold, and a 2010 letter from the Joint Committee on Printing, the Library of Congress and Government Publishing Office began moving on how it publishes the Constitution Annotated online. There had long been a version available on the Congressional intranet, with hyperlinks and regular updates and everything, and a very limited version on GPO’s site, but now — finally — there’d be an online version that everyone could read, reuse, and would have timely updates.
Well, that didn’t quite happen as we hoped. Instead, the Library/GPO released a new app that published the document as a giant PDF. It’s pretty darn impossible to read that on your phone. And it isn’t updated all that often.
Compare that to the internal website available to Congressional staff. It’s got hyperlinks, is updated frequently, and makes the information available in a user-friendly way. So we’ve continued (2013, 2014, 2016) calling on the Library, GPO, and their oversight committees to release the Constitution Annotated as it’s updated and in a machine-readable format.
At this point, all that’s necessary is for the Library of Congress to mirror the webpages that are available internally and publish that. We’ll figure out how to piece it together. (Federal law already requires that the Constitution Annotated be publicly available, so there’s no concerns about confidentiality.)
Wouldn’t it be great if every American could have at their fingertips an expert, non-partisan explanation of the U.S. Constitution? It’s be a great resource for everyone, from schoolchildren to scholars. If the Constitution Annotated were available in a slightly better format, it’d be easy to use that information to automatically update Wikipedia, or answer questions in a chatbot, or be put to a number of uses that raise our level of conversation.
It’s time. Let’s publish the Constitution Annotated online in a format that everyone can use.
— Written by Daniel Schuman
