I suppose it means that has to be available to you somehow, the easiest example perhaps being that if you're renting in such a place, the landlord is obligated to ensure access.
> lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
The "right" here is about other people not contaminating your well for their profit. You don't have that right. They can contaminate your well for their profit and you have to find another source of water at your own cost.
I think it's covered under that "right to life" section of the Constitution. Deliberately poisoning people through their water supply seems like a sure-fire way to deny the right to life of your citizens.
It hasn't counted when it's "accidental" - eg: pretty much all of the US uranium leach well mining resulted in tainted water in a "yeah we know, but don't care" process.
Also radioactive tailings dam collapses and hard rock mining consequences:
On Poisoned Ground
The largest accidental release of radioactivity in the United States did not occur in 1979 at Three-Mile Island. That very same year a collapsing dam released a flood of radioactive debris into the Navajo Nation.
'We didn't know we were poisoning ourselves': the deadly legacy of the US uranium boom
Tsosie was one of thousands of Navajos who took jobs in the mines, starting in the 1940s. They worked without masks or ventilation to disperse the lethal radon gas, and they were never told the rocks they were handling – leetso in the Diné language, or yellow dirt – were deadly.
I believe it is important for us to consider where rights derive from. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are designed to protect rights that humans already have ("endowed by their Creator") and prevent the government from taking them away, or infringing on them. The law can grant ordinary civil rights, above and beyond intrinsic human rights, but if the Constitution isn't protecting the latter, then there is a problem.
As the other poster mentions, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is not from the Constitution but from the Declaration of Independence. As much as it might be part of American civic lore, the Declaration of Independence is not legally binding, it is a product from two whole legal regimes before our current one was founded.
The current court has made it clear "civic lore" is fundamental to interpreting the Constitution, though curiously this seems to only apply to certain causes.
Could we please not? For heaven’s sake, the first line of the article:
> (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Can you not see an issue there? Can you not read past the title?
If you don’t know what “a right to safe water” means, then could you please do a web search to try to be informed about the matter before commenting? Took me two seconds to find a UN page.
> Access to water and sanitation are recognized by the United Nations as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity.
And on the second paragraph:
> Governments must take a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to water and sanitation improvements
There. There’s your right to water. It’s means that because it’s something fundamental, nations have an (at a minimum moral, but often legal) obligation to provide it to everyone under them that lacks it.
Just for good measure, here’s the Wikipedia page on Human Rights too.
What it needs is for us to not make up extreme scenarios to excuse not handling the obvious ones, which are extensively covered in the sources I linked you to. Obviously “reasonable” is implied; “unreasonable” is, by definition, absurd.
That’s the thought behind the “Could we please not?”. Who, exactly, are those the people in your scenarios in the proverbial middle of nowhere going to “demand” water from? That is obviously not the same thing as not caring for the infrastructure under your control or letting people knowingly be contaminated.
The point of an starting with an extreme scenario is to help find the shape of that law. Start at the ends, and work your way towards the center.
We've already watered down this right from a "right to water" to a "right to reasonable access of water". That's already a huge change. Next reasonable needs to be defined using a similar process.
> And if in your small town everybody is obese, before to blame everybody for eating too much, or being lazy couch potatos, look for chemicals in the drinking water, leading to a broken satiety system, causing people to eat huge amounts of food. This is why the right to have safe drinking water is so important.
I don't think there's any reason to assume that obesity is caused by any specific chemical found in some but not all drinking water, in such a way that explains differences in obesity rates. If that were the case we probably would've figured that out by now and would be systematically treating drinking water to remove that chemical.
Imagine your well becomes contaminated. That might be natural, or it might be caused by eg fracking. If the latter, do you have any rights and recourse?
(I’m curious of my own situation as a European with my own well and also not so far from a well documented case against the government because their airbase fire fighting had contaminated groundwater with PFAS.)
Framing the lawsuit as a demand for free water or to create new amendments is actually absurd.
In this case, the plaintiffs did not claim a constitutional "right to water." They claimed a violation of the *existing 14th Amendment's Due Process.
Some of *this case's judges agreed with this view. They directly cited the 2019 ruling from Flint, Michigan: a government knowingly pumping lead into homes while lying about public safety is an outrageous, conscience-shocking violation of the Constitution.
The Fourteenth Amendment protects bodily integrity. This means the government cannot actively harm your physical body without due process of law to enact that bodily harm against you.
- Officials altered the water supply and ignored treatment failures, making the tap water toxic.
- Officials knowingly lied to residents that the water was safe.
- This deception induced residents to drink poisoned water and ingest lead.
- Deliberately poisoning citizens and covering it up violates bodily integrity.
EDIT: The dissent begins on page 14 if you want to see the complete analysis:
I think this is a ruling that's hard to justify. There are many frameworks under which the judge could have chosen to rule, it could be treated as assault, or some type of aggravated assault/battery, if the lead can be measured in the people who consumed it, it could be treated as fraud, since the water is presumably sold, etc. and reasoning about that it would ordinarily be a punishable tort would make it clear that the government can't impose that sort of thing either, just as it can't send anyone out to punch people.
The ruling expressly states that they are free to pursue whatever tort claims they want. This ruling is about violations of constitutional rights and standing to sue under 42 U.S. Code § 1983 - Civil action for deprivation of rights.
Still, it's very obviously a deprivation of right to deliberately trick people into drinking poisoned water or other poisoned things.
The right not to be deliberately poisoned doesn't disappear just because the act was achieved by leading you to the poisoned object and deceiving you that it was safe, instead of handing you an object that has been poisoned by hand.
This does not imply a right to clean water, as the judge chooses to interpret their question as asking him to recognize, and shows that his choice is in fact sufficient even if that is what they asked.
Misleadingly provocative headline, right? The actual ruling from the article is that the US Constitution does not by itself grant US citizens that right. As the article itself points out, there’s nothing stopping other agreements from granting the right, and indeed several states do so explicitly.
The US Constitution, by itself, grants US citizens everything as a right, then enumerates the exceptions to those all-encompassing rights carved out as necessary for the operation of a government.
The correct question is: Where does the US Constitution grant governments the power to poison and lie to residents?
This isn’t some pedantry but fundamental American civics. The US Constitution explicitly does not enumerate rights. It’s default-allow, explicit-deny regarding human rights. It’s rather alarming that anyone would think it’s default-deny, explicit-allow. That’s not how the Constitution is written.
The tenth amendment provides that the federal government has only the enumerated powers and everything else is for the States or the people. It doesn't limit the States to enumerated powers.
I looked a bit in the early morning to see what arguments were effective in the Flint case which has similiar municipal activities... The case history there was too complex for me. Many suits in federal and state court, lots of federal suits dismissed for various reasons (mostly lack of standing if I understood the summary) and then a settlement in federal court that resolved all (most?) of the suits. I didn't really see a discussion of the legal theory from which liability arose, just what the remedy was and if it the settlement was reasonable for minors and unrepresented parties.
Finding an argument that pleases the court and/or appealing to a higher court in the hopes that your argument pleases them is pendantry and american civics.
Guess what folks, you now have anti rights.Sometimes I hate America and some americans for the bad things they do, but not like that. A good deal of what america is doing to itself these days looks just as insane as what they are doing to other countrys, or at least other countrys that are not doing it to themselves.
There used to be metaphors about poison, and wells, but no one imagined that is could or would leap past that, and become ledgislated policy.
The shitty thing for all humans is that many governments and voters l just do what America does because…murica, you can see every democracy teetering on the edge of the same idiocracy.
This headline is not correct. The ruling was that a constitutional lawsuit was not successful, not that the the US government has carte blanche to poison its citizens drinking water…
So, the correct headline would be “safe drinking water ruled not to be covered by the US constitution”. There are other binding agreements and regulations than the constitution in the US.
No, that headline would still be wrong. It makes no sense to make water exempt from other forms of damage caused by treatment or contamination. By the same "logic" you apply here, you could reason that radiation is exempt from the constitution because back in 1796 something they did not specify that down via law. That makes no sense.
"Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.” "
" “Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”"
He basically says, the constitution does not care, whether the government lies to citizens, so they continue to drink poison water.
Well, I always though trust of citizens in government is the main thing a constitution should provide and establish, but the "Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt" apparently thinks different.
Plaintiffs ... seek recognition of two new constitutional rights lacking any foundation in the history and tradition of our Nation—the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials.
This is like filing a bug report that the Linux kernel allowed your Thunderbird to receive SPAM email containing false information. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how the US government is designed to work. Closed by Fifth Circuit as WONTFIX, file request for constitutional amendment (RFC) if desired.
Denying citizenship is about denying constitutional rights to large groups of people.
Fascist governments routinely strip targeted populations of legal protections and citizenship rights to consolidate state power.
Claiming "election integrity" is all about reproducing this: Benito Mussolini in Italy utilized single-slate plebiscites under the watch of violent squadristi (Blackshirts) to produce near-unanimous results.
When people call this stuff fascism, it's not hand-waving nonsense. It's hyper-specific, extremely precise, rigorously cited claims like when they said about political dissent, "we will find you and we will kill you". https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-U... because like Dachau, they want to find their political enemies and kill them.
Generally, I've seen courts derive this kind of right from general rights like "the state cannot just arbitrarily kill or maim you", which (hopefully) are explicitly written down. So it doesn't feel that unreasonable to ask the court to specify that "the state cannot just arbitrarily kill or maim you" extends to "the state cannot arbitrarily lie to you in ways that will endanger your life/health".
The first one I can traditionally understand (although I do not agree). But the right to accurate information from public officials, I thought that was indeed an absolute right in a democracy, and it should very strongly be and always have been.
Time to stop considering the US a democracy? It feels the country is it’s own weird system now, not sure how to classify it but something I would call Trumpocracy. The democratic processes don’t seem to serve the people, it’s all hacks to try to use the system against itself to entrench the administration ideology (some might draw parallels to history here)
Now I want to read a version of that report with 2026 events taken in account. It feels like the US is on its way to be an elected autocracy according to that framework
Congress is supposed to be the forum wherein this happens. It's intentionally a broader forum of people's representatives from the entire nation. If congress can't agree to a law then the federal government probably shouldn't be doing it, even if something is desirable.
Be careful of blind partnership. Both parties have been increasingly guilty of this in recent decades. The republican party internal dynamics are just the most recent.
Even then Trump has been loosing his grip on the republicans in congress. It's slight but there. IMHO thats for the best.
To be sure, there's a good discussion to be had about this, whether it should be the parliament or the judiciary that can rule over this, or both, and different countries have different balances in this area.
Generally speaking however, the law and especially the constitution is full of abstract and fuzzy concepts, and judges should have ample experience in adjudicating those, as well as balancing them against each other. And don't come to me with alt-right reasoning about what is accurate, true or false. Basic truth isn't too hard to determine.
The main thing is that there should be checks and balances, especially on the executive branch, and currently the US is dismantling them in bulk.
Yes, it’s the european model rooted in Prussian imperial bureaucracy versus the American model rooted in the wisdom of the crowds. You’re welcome to like your approach better. But our approach has an impeccable track record.
That's... a matter of interpretation, if I'm reading the news of what's happening over there. I'm quite happy we got the 2.0 version of separation of powers here, as well as a constitution that's a little less set in stone.
There’s a map/territory error in conflating the right to accurate information (or the obligation of government officials to not knowingly lie) with court determination of what accurate information is in any specific case.
We have a very clear constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and yes, determining what that means is very fuzzy and always has been. Doesn’t make the right evaporate.
But even separating the two, the entire court system is literally designed to determine what’s true. From murder to false advertising, the courts exist to resolve disputes about what’s true.
If we’re saying they can’t or shouldn’t fulfill that role… what’s left? Just enforce the will of the current government, skipping all that stuff about testimony and fact-finding?
Sure, agreed on both counts. But to the extent government officials have a duty not to lie to the public, that duty extends to facts, not political opinions. I find the courts a perfectly reasonable way to adjucate e.g. the actual water volume in the Colorado river.
I believe that "accurate" in this context means "not knowingly a lie" rather than "is objectively correct". The allegation is that city officials knew the water was not safe to drink but told residents that it was safe.
Who decides if I committed a crime by lieing/telling inaccurate information to the FBI? Oh, the courts do you say? If they can police me over such a fuzzy concept, they can police themselves as well.
The federal courts are going to be surprised when their 'there is no law, just enforcement we want on the plebs' results in juries made up of plebs stop approving the unfairly applied to some people convictions the feds want. It's basically the last recourse we have. 'enforce the law correctly and fairly, or we the people will stop enforcing it at all'.
> But the right to accurate information from public officials, I thought that was indeed an absolute and basic right in a democracy
That's a misunderstanding on your part. You can't have a "right to accurate information" because officials might simply be wrong. "Being wrong" can't be against the law. Additionally, people simply disagree about lots of things and often there's no procedure to resolve this.
However, you can't lie under oath, or in front of Congress. But lying is not the same as providing inaccurate information. In most other contexts, lying is legal.
Sure they can. Jails (run by the local police or sheriff) lie about the safety of the food they serve, the facilities they run, the outcomes of the policies they implement all the time.
In saying “accurate information” there is a hidden presumption that not all government information needs to be shared. Forget about whether it’s accurate or not and who decides what’s accurate, just be maximally open
The framers discussed this in a few key ways, which resonate ALL TOO WELL with today:
Anti federalist Brutus 1 suggested that in a large republic, representatives will be too far removed from their constituents. Because citizens cannot personally observe public officials, the people "cannot be acquainted with their characters, know their motives, nor be informed of their proceedings." A lack of information would prevent citizens from holding officials accountable.
Anti federalist Centinel 1 directly warns against the manipulation of information by the wealthy elite, arguing that the public can easily be deceived by "well-born" politicians who mask their pursuit of tyranny behind noble rhetoric.
In Federalist 10 and 51 Madison argued alternatively (looks naive today) that a large, diverse republic makes it harder for corrupt politicians or factions to spread misinformation effectively across the entire nation.
In Federalist 70 Hamilton explicitly defended a single, powerful President because it provides accountability. With a single executive, the public knows exactly who to blame for bad policy or false statements, preventing officials from shifting blame or hiding behind an anonymous committee
But the Sedition Act passed only 10 years after the constitution made it illegal to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government, a restriction it could be argued that the government doesn’t even have in itself
Modern law of relevance include the Smith Mundt Act 1948 which prohibited the government from propagandizing its own people (limited to foreigners). The smith mundt “modernization” amendment crammed into NDAA 2012 did away with this restriction and now we have an explosion of govt-payroll influencers , news anchors, talking points memos etc that aren’t exactly…accurate
Laudato Si' by Pope Francis: On Care for Our Common Home
30. Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. This debt can be paid partly by an increase in funding to provide clean water and sanitary services among the poor. But water continues to be wasted, not only in the developed world but also in developing countries which possess it in abundance. This shows that the problem of water is partly an educational and cultural issue, since there is little awareness of the seriousness of such behaviour within a context of great inequality.
The judge evidently is just a tool employed by Trump - against the people. Interesting that there may still be anyone who is not super-rich be a supporter of Trump if you give them factual evidence like this here. But ignoring this for the moment, the judge says that damage by drinking is exempt from other damage. This makes no sense. Even the USA has protection laws against harm. For instance, liability claims of medical damage and what not; even with the current administration, e. g. damage caused by a vaccine (in rare cases). So the judge is totally inconsistent here - the argument that damage via contaminated water should not be considered, makes objectively no sense. AI would do a better job than this "judge".
> The judge evidently is just a tool employed by Trump - against the people. Interesting that there may still be anyone who is not super-rich be a supporter of Trump if you give them factual evidence like this here.
It depends on if they click the link in the article to the actual ruling and read it. If they do all they will conclude is that the article's author is completely incompetent when it comes to writing on court rulings.
First, it was a ruling by 10 judges on a panel of 15, with the other 5 judges dissenting in part and concurring in part. The judge named in the article was the judge who the chief judge assigned the task of writing up the majority opinion.
Second, the court did not say those things that the crappy article made you think they said. Briefly, they said that the harms to the plaintiffs are not covered under the specific statute that plaintiffs used, which covers violations of certain Constitutional rights.
Crazy that the comments are about the title and the how the legal system should work or does not work but no one cares if the water they need to survive is drinkable or not.
You can have any number of mandates that aren't state or federal constitutional rights.
"Right" is the wrong word here. I think it's entirely correct that you have no "right" to clean or safe drinking water.
You have a right to persue that and all your other needs.
And you have a right to tell the government (collectively) to make drinking water a goal, collect taxes to pay for it, and issue mandates to whatever organizations needed to be responsible for making it happen.
Presumably all of that was already in effect since a long time ago, and the problem is various people not doing their jobs in good faith.
Somewhere along the way the people voted for officials who would establish safe municiple water. Somewhere along the way officials set the goals and hired the contractors and set up ongoing operation & maintainance, and that all involved some sort of official mandate with terms and goals written down. And somewhere along the way one or more people are guilty of not performing a duty they were responsible for.
We may not, but we should, have a right to good faith discharge of duties.
US courts have no problem inventing new rights for sitting US presidents. But if the people want something, they can just go die in a ditch (full of contaminated water, while being lied to about it by government officials). Classic USA.
This is the signal the the government no longer serves the people. Delivering water is a basic government function. If they won’t make water a right, expect large numbers of dead.
Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator had come to replace water, virtually everywhere. Water, the basic component of all life, had been deemed a threat to Brawndo's profit margin.
Ok, so the article buries a lot of the context here. To clarify: plaintiffs can 100% sue the city for this under tort law (I believe the clean water act, but there’s probably other causes of action). This particular case was about suing the city officials in their personal capacity. So making those individuals pay, instead of/in addition to the city. Government officials are generally protected under qualified immunity. One exception to qualified immunity is 42 USC 1983: deprivation of rights under color of law. But that requires them to prove that these officials violated some constitutional right, beyond just some statute.
The victims can sue the city/state. They might already be doing so in parallel. And honestly that’s the only way to be made whole: these city officials don’t have the tens of millions that would be required to compensate victims. This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
> This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
The state can also file criminal charges against the officials, although given that the Flint water crisis didn't result in any criminal convictions despite the evidence, I'm not holding my breath. Not to mention that the state could choose _not_ to file charges. In which case, what avenue for justice is left? Financial compensation is only part of it.
A pretty bad article. In the American system we constantly test the boundaries of legal definition and it makes sense to test whether "how a water system is managed by a town" and "the right to bodily integrity are overlapping or not, and which way the decision falls is not aprioi obvious.
So it's normal for a judge to have decided this way. Doesn't mean "Americans don't like clear water"
The other thing annoying about the article is the racial angle. The author goes out of her way to mention that the affected town is heavily African American. She doesn't mention that the list of officials that are named as the defendants (including the mayor) are also African American. I am not sure either fact is actually significant, but it's annoying to only have half the story mentioned.
I think there is a difference between a right to safe drinking water and a right to provided water which is safe.
The government cannot have a responsibility to provide every person with water, since some people will choose to live in places which are incompatible with that mandate.
But if the government does provide water, it must be clean.
It’s just the government holding itself to its own standard —— if my bottle of Pepsi turned out to have lead in it, the EPA would go to the ends of the earth to pull every bottle from the shelf until the company fixes it. We should expect nothing less from the water in our pipes.
The article makes it sound like this was a ruling from one judge. In fact it was a 15 judge panel. The article is talking about the majority ruling, which was joined by 10 judges. The judge they name is the judge the chief judge assigned to write the majority opinion.
The other 5 judges wrote a separate opinion dissenting in part and concurring in part.
The article did do something quite well that way too many articles on court rulings fail to do. That is link to the actual ruling [1].
It is probably best to just read that directly if you want to actually understand what is going on.
102 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] threadA lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells.
> lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
The "right" here is about other people not contaminating your well for their profit. You don't have that right. They can contaminate your well for their profit and you have to find another source of water at your own cost.
Also radioactive tailings dam collapses and hard rock mining consequences:
On Poisoned Ground
~ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/on-poisoned-...'We didn't know we were poisoning ourselves': the deadly legacy of the US uranium boom
~ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/navajo-dine-ur...The US Constitution? Perhaps you are thinking of the Declaration of Independence?
Or the Fifth Amendment, formulating it in the negative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
I believe it is important for us to consider where rights derive from. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are designed to protect rights that humans already have ("endowed by their Creator") and prevent the government from taking them away, or infringing on them. The law can grant ordinary civil rights, above and beyond intrinsic human rights, but if the Constitution isn't protecting the latter, then there is a problem.
> (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Can you not see an issue there? Can you not read past the title?
If you don’t know what “a right to safe water” means, then could you please do a web search to try to be informed about the matter before commenting? Took me two seconds to find a UN page.
https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s...
Again, on the first sentence, in bold:
> Access to water and sanitation are recognized by the United Nations as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity.
And on the second paragraph:
> Governments must take a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to water and sanitation improvements
There. There’s your right to water. It’s means that because it’s something fundamental, nations have an (at a minimum moral, but often legal) obligation to provide it to everyone under them that lacks it.
Just for good measure, here’s the Wikipedia page on Human Rights too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
Again, the first sentence already explains a lot.
What it needs is for us to not make up extreme scenarios to excuse not handling the obvious ones, which are extensively covered in the sources I linked you to. Obviously “reasonable” is implied; “unreasonable” is, by definition, absurd.
That’s the thought behind the “Could we please not?”. Who, exactly, are those the people in your scenarios in the proverbial middle of nowhere going to “demand” water from? That is obviously not the same thing as not caring for the infrastructure under your control or letting people knowingly be contaminated.
We've already watered down this right from a "right to water" to a "right to reasonable access of water". That's already a huge change. Next reasonable needs to be defined using a similar process.
I don't think there's any reason to assume that obesity is caused by any specific chemical found in some but not all drinking water, in such a way that explains differences in obesity rates. If that were the case we probably would've figured that out by now and would be systematically treating drinking water to remove that chemical.
(I’m curious of my own situation as a European with my own well and also not so far from a well documented case against the government because their airbase fire fighting had contaminated groundwater with PFAS.)
In this case, the plaintiffs did not claim a constitutional "right to water." They claimed a violation of the *existing 14th Amendment's Due Process.
Some of *this case's judges agreed with this view. They directly cited the 2019 ruling from Flint, Michigan: a government knowingly pumping lead into homes while lying about public safety is an outrageous, conscience-shocking violation of the Constitution.
The Fourteenth Amendment protects bodily integrity. This means the government cannot actively harm your physical body without due process of law to enact that bodily harm against you.
- Officials altered the water supply and ignored treatment failures, making the tap water toxic.
- Officials knowingly lied to residents that the water was safe.
- This deception induced residents to drink poisoned water and ingest lead.
- Deliberately poisoning citizens and covering it up violates bodily integrity.
EDIT: The dissent begins on page 14 if you want to see the complete analysis:
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
The right not to be deliberately poisoned doesn't disappear just because the act was achieved by leading you to the poisoned object and deceiving you that it was safe, instead of handing you an object that has been poisoned by hand.
This does not imply a right to clean water, as the judge chooses to interpret their question as asking him to recognize, and shows that his choice is in fact sufficient even if that is what they asked.
The correct question is: Where does the US Constitution grant governments the power to poison and lie to residents?
This isn’t some pedantry but fundamental American civics. The US Constitution explicitly does not enumerate rights. It’s default-allow, explicit-deny regarding human rights. It’s rather alarming that anyone would think it’s default-deny, explicit-allow. That’s not how the Constitution is written.
I looked a bit in the early morning to see what arguments were effective in the Flint case which has similiar municipal activities... The case history there was too complex for me. Many suits in federal and state court, lots of federal suits dismissed for various reasons (mostly lack of standing if I understood the summary) and then a settlement in federal court that resolved all (most?) of the suits. I didn't really see a discussion of the legal theory from which liability arose, just what the remedy was and if it the settlement was reasonable for minors and unrepresented parties.
Finding an argument that pleases the court and/or appealing to a higher court in the hopes that your argument pleases them is pendantry and american civics.
So, the correct headline would be “safe drinking water ruled not to be covered by the US constitution”. There are other binding agreements and regulations than the constitution in the US.
" “Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”"
He basically says, the constitution does not care, whether the government lies to citizens, so they continue to drink poison water.
Well, I always though trust of citizens in government is the main thing a constitution should provide and establish, but the "Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt" apparently thinks different.
This is like filing a bug report that the Linux kernel allowed your Thunderbird to receive SPAM email containing false information. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how the US government is designed to work. Closed by Fifth Circuit as WONTFIX, file request for constitutional amendment (RFC) if desired.
These headlines is just press fodder for the helplessly incompetent to cry about how the gov is incompetent
In 2020 Trump admin tried very hard to find some and there attempts were thrown out in court 59/60 cases
The only thing they won on involved a Pennsylvania judge extending mail in ballot deadline beyond their authority. Not a case of fraud.
v. Wisconsin Elections Commission — federal district court, Brett Ludwig, Donald Trump
Same case — 7th Circuit appeal, Michael Scudder, Donald Trump
7th Circuit panel, Joel Flaum, Ronald Reagan
7th Circuit panel, Ilana Rovner, George H. W. Bush
Pennsylvania appeal, Trump v. Boockvar, Stephanos Bibas, Donald Trump
Pennsylvania district court, Trump v. Boockvar, Matthew Brann, Barack Obama
Michigan “Kraken” case, King v. Whitmer, Linda Parker, Barack Obama
Georgia “Kraken” case, Timothy Batten, George W. Bush
Arizona challenge, Diane Humetewa, Barack Obama
Georgia election challenge, Steven Grimberg, Donald Trump
Fascist governments routinely strip targeted populations of legal protections and citizenship rights to consolidate state power.
Claiming "election integrity" is all about reproducing this: Benito Mussolini in Italy utilized single-slate plebiscites under the watch of violent squadristi (Blackshirts) to produce near-unanimous results.
When people call this stuff fascism, it's not hand-waving nonsense. It's hyper-specific, extremely precise, rigorously cited claims like when they said about political dissent, "we will find you and we will kill you". https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-U... because like Dachau, they want to find their political enemies and kill them.
I'm not sure how the hell anyone can excersize that right without accurate info from the government.
Even then Trump has been loosing his grip on the republicans in congress. It's slight but there. IMHO thats for the best.
Previously agencies. Now everything bubbles up to the supreme court.
Generally speaking however, the law and especially the constitution is full of abstract and fuzzy concepts, and judges should have ample experience in adjudicating those, as well as balancing them against each other. And don't come to me with alt-right reasoning about what is accurate, true or false. Basic truth isn't too hard to determine.
The main thing is that there should be checks and balances, especially on the executive branch, and currently the US is dismantling them in bulk.
We have a very clear constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and yes, determining what that means is very fuzzy and always has been. Doesn’t make the right evaporate.
But even separating the two, the entire court system is literally designed to determine what’s true. From murder to false advertising, the courts exist to resolve disputes about what’s true.
If we’re saying they can’t or shouldn’t fulfill that role… what’s left? Just enforce the will of the current government, skipping all that stuff about testimony and fact-finding?
https://www.dougmurphylaw.com/criminal-defense/federal-crime...
The federal courts are going to be surprised when their 'there is no law, just enforcement we want on the plebs' results in juries made up of plebs stop approving the unfairly applied to some people convictions the feds want. It's basically the last recourse we have. 'enforce the law correctly and fairly, or we the people will stop enforcing it at all'.
That's a misunderstanding on your part. You can't have a "right to accurate information" because officials might simply be wrong. "Being wrong" can't be against the law. Additionally, people simply disagree about lots of things and often there's no procedure to resolve this.
However, you can't lie under oath, or in front of Congress. But lying is not the same as providing inaccurate information. In most other contexts, lying is legal.
In many countries, both democratic and not, police can lie (e.g. to try to get a suspect make a mistake and expose some information).
In saying “accurate information” there is a hidden presumption that not all government information needs to be shared. Forget about whether it’s accurate or not and who decides what’s accurate, just be maximally open
The framers discussed this in a few key ways, which resonate ALL TOO WELL with today:
Anti federalist Brutus 1 suggested that in a large republic, representatives will be too far removed from their constituents. Because citizens cannot personally observe public officials, the people "cannot be acquainted with their characters, know their motives, nor be informed of their proceedings." A lack of information would prevent citizens from holding officials accountable.
Anti federalist Centinel 1 directly warns against the manipulation of information by the wealthy elite, arguing that the public can easily be deceived by "well-born" politicians who mask their pursuit of tyranny behind noble rhetoric.
In Federalist 10 and 51 Madison argued alternatively (looks naive today) that a large, diverse republic makes it harder for corrupt politicians or factions to spread misinformation effectively across the entire nation.
In Federalist 70 Hamilton explicitly defended a single, powerful President because it provides accountability. With a single executive, the public knows exactly who to blame for bad policy or false statements, preventing officials from shifting blame or hiding behind an anonymous committee
But the Sedition Act passed only 10 years after the constitution made it illegal to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government, a restriction it could be argued that the government doesn’t even have in itself
Modern law of relevance include the Smith Mundt Act 1948 which prohibited the government from propagandizing its own people (limited to foreigners). The smith mundt “modernization” amendment crammed into NDAA 2012 did away with this restriction and now we have an explosion of govt-payroll influencers , news anchors, talking points memos etc that aren’t exactly…accurate
Laudato Si' by Pope Francis: On Care for Our Common Home
It depends on if they click the link in the article to the actual ruling and read it. If they do all they will conclude is that the article's author is completely incompetent when it comes to writing on court rulings.
First, it was a ruling by 10 judges on a panel of 15, with the other 5 judges dissenting in part and concurring in part. The judge named in the article was the judge who the chief judge assigned the task of writing up the majority opinion.
Second, the court did not say those things that the crappy article made you think they said. Briefly, they said that the harms to the plaintiffs are not covered under the specific statute that plaintiffs used, which covers violations of certain Constitutional rights.
I am out of words for this comment section.
"Right" is the wrong word here. I think it's entirely correct that you have no "right" to clean or safe drinking water.
You have a right to persue that and all your other needs.
And you have a right to tell the government (collectively) to make drinking water a goal, collect taxes to pay for it, and issue mandates to whatever organizations needed to be responsible for making it happen.
Presumably all of that was already in effect since a long time ago, and the problem is various people not doing their jobs in good faith.
Somewhere along the way the people voted for officials who would establish safe municiple water. Somewhere along the way officials set the goals and hired the contractors and set up ongoing operation & maintainance, and that all involved some sort of official mandate with terms and goals written down. And somewhere along the way one or more people are guilty of not performing a duty they were responsible for.
We may not, but we should, have a right to good faith discharge of duties.
The victims can sue the city/state. They might already be doing so in parallel. And honestly that’s the only way to be made whole: these city officials don’t have the tens of millions that would be required to compensate victims. This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
The state can also file criminal charges against the officials, although given that the Flint water crisis didn't result in any criminal convictions despite the evidence, I'm not holding my breath. Not to mention that the state could choose _not_ to file charges. In which case, what avenue for justice is left? Financial compensation is only part of it.
So it's normal for a judge to have decided this way. Doesn't mean "Americans don't like clear water"
The other thing annoying about the article is the racial angle. The author goes out of her way to mention that the affected town is heavily African American. She doesn't mention that the list of officials that are named as the defendants (including the mayor) are also African American. I am not sure either fact is actually significant, but it's annoying to only have half the story mentioned.
The government cannot have a responsibility to provide every person with water, since some people will choose to live in places which are incompatible with that mandate.
But if the government does provide water, it must be clean.
It’s just the government holding itself to its own standard —— if my bottle of Pepsi turned out to have lead in it, the EPA would go to the ends of the earth to pull every bottle from the shelf until the company fixes it. We should expect nothing less from the water in our pipes.
The other 5 judges wrote a separate opinion dissenting in part and concurring in part.
The article did do something quite well that way too many articles on court rulings fail to do. That is link to the actual ruling [1].
It is probably best to just read that directly if you want to actually understand what is going on.
[1] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...