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.
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.
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".
I am absolutely mindboggled at the idea that you think the US should not guarantee safe drinking water everywhere for everyone. Unless this comment is pedantic legal snark.
But maybe it should be? What does it say about the US government apparatus and its basic claims to legitimacy if it can't even guarantee safe drinking water? What lack of aspiration and ambition does such a denial demonstrate? Why should its citizens accept such an abdication of even the most basic duties?
You're not making an argument there. The people, through the government, chooses what is a right and what isn't. Not you alone. Clean drinking water seems pretty fucking important to me, and to a lot of other people too, it seems.
The authorities assuring that the drinking water that is sold to you is really of drinking water grade is the most basic of the basic rights. Not a luxury. The "right to culture almonds" or to have a pool is a different question.
The natural state of being is freedom, it up to society to restrict what they deemed necessary and punish the offenders. Unless the body of water or reservoir are claimed by the government then it is free for anyone to use, quality notwithstanding. Safe, clean water implies certain amount of processing and I agree that unless it is explicitly written then it is up to the users to sanitize that water
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.
> The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity, and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices - a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis”
The constitutional question (and note that state Constitutions, e.g. Massachusetts, may instead cover it) is just one piece of the mess.
As for the content: the law says what it says. Where in the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments does it say that a state government must be truthful about public health statements?
The law says what it says. A behavior might be rotten, evil, illegal under other documents, and an all-round bad idea and still not a violation of, in particular, the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments
But not Mississippi evidently, or the court probably would've mentioned that and Mother Jones reporter Sophie Hurwitz would've mentioned that in the article. Maybe Mississippi should enact some kind of state constitutional provision asserting this, but they haven't.
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.
What I'm saying though, is that he has room enough to interpret things so that a dismissal isn't necessary.
It isn't the job of the courts to make minimal rulings and avoiding all substantial questions, but to solve disputes. Here we have a case where the government has harmed people in a way that would be a tort if it had been done by anybody else, and people arguing that the government by doing so breached a right. There is presumably a right which can be interpreted as guaranteeing that people's bodies won't be messed with, or things in the US would be quite strange, so there's room to do something useful here, and the judge's choice is not forced.
Exactly, unless they ignore that and decide based on precedent. But after we fence them in with arguments, evidence, AND precedence then surely.. oh nope, they could ignore those things and talk about reliance interest! I'm sure someone wrote down exactly how much reliance interest is "sufficient" to justify doing something else though. No? Gosh it sounds like a rigorous process and all but I'm starting to think maybe they just do whatever they want
This is something that is always fundamentally misunderstood. Of course, judges can extend courtesy but most modern systems are designed on pretty much the accuser arguing their case against the defender with the judge deciding based on law plus arguments presented in court.
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.
> Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
Nah, headline is optimistic actually: no right to clean water, to water tests, or to the truth about the tests if they occur. No right to healthcare, schools, or even deliverable mail either. But surely some of these are just the kind of thing you might expect as an absolute minimum everywhere if you have to pay taxes.
Sorry, I think your pull quote is actually contradicting your gloss. Again, the pull quote states that it doesn’t infringe any constitutional right, not that it doesn’t infringe any rights granted for any other reason?
Cool cool, I can see you've got a sharp eye for detail my friend but let's really get down to it. What exactly is it that you really want to defend here? Why do you want to defend it? And more to the point, do you like drinking clean water? Do you think people should have it or not?
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.
By this logic, state employees and elected officials, who are themselves US citizens, have the right to say anything at all to the public, including blatant lies about public health issues, because there's no specific legal exception banning them from doing so.
> Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing tort
claims, electing representatives who will better manage the public-water
system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies.
which is easier said than done.
From outside of US this seems extremely ass backwards.
The headline look pretty accurate to me. Under this ruling, being a US citizen does not guarantee you a constitutional right to safe drinking water; that right would depend on state legislation.
I think the bigger deal is that the people of Jackson were lied to and this sets the precedent that there is no recourse. It's not like someone in Flint knowingly drank contaminated water, the city withheld the fact that their water was contaminated with unsafe levels of lead.
As the article says, the situation in Jackson was deplorable; and it is indeed mind-boggling (to my puny European mind) that the same constitution which grants freedom of speech and the press was also not intended to grant the right to receive only believed-correct information from the government. But the ruling, for example, is not quoted as making any mention of any federal laws? The headline may be true for all I know, but the article provides only evidence for its truth about one particular source of 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.
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.
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 and does it make a difference if the poisoner is state, federal or private?
(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.)
> I'm not sure what a right to water really means.
Right to safe water. It means that the water in your kitchen faucet is expected/guaranteed to be safe to drink.
It must not have: noxious bacteria causing diarrhea, or liver parasite eggs, or mud, or mercury/heavy metals, or remains of faeces, or fracking methane, or pesticides, or medicines, or obesogens [1].
It must had been professionally filtered and treated to assure that none of those reach your home.
If you pay for water classified as "drinking water", you should not receive grey water, soapy bubbles, oily mud or anything else. This is the standard in all first country nations and I assume that it should be the same in US.
[1] 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Could we please not? In the first sentence of the article:
> (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Surely you can see an issue there? Can we please make a collected effort to comment beyond 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 minimally 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’s your right to water. It means that because it’s something fundamental to human life, nations have an (at a minimum moral, often legal) obligation to provide it or protect access to it to everyone under them that lacks it.
Just for good measure, here’s the Wikipedia page on Human Rights too.
It needs more qualifications IMO. "reasonable access" perhaps? I mean how would you handle someone who drives their car into the desert or climbs to the top of a mountain and demands water?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
America voted for unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism not just once but twice. They knew what MAGA and Project 2025 were about, both announced their intentions clear as day, and now they're getting unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism - a world where corporations can do whatever the hell they want and people either have no rights at all or the rights they have on paper are de facto meaningless.
Can’t really see how it can be reigned in and once it’s done with America it’s coming for everyone else. Australia with one nation and UK with reform for example.
My honest assessment is the tech bros felt threatened from potential regulation and decided to do use their platforms and influence to encourage more of the same destruction everywhere else. I cannot explain it any other way. Why would nearly all of them have backed the orange boy ?
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".
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.
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.
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".
100% this
These headlines is just press fodder for the grievances-industrial-complex to cry about how the gov is incompetent
Why is someone who wants non-contaminated drinking water incompetent?
Not everything you want - or need - is a right.
And establishing a new right is not the only way to get what you want or need.
But this are just empty statements.
You forgot the actual argument about why this want and this way of getting it is a sign of incompetence
I am absolutely mindboggled at the idea that you think the US should not guarantee safe drinking water everywhere for everyone. Unless this comment is pedantic legal snark.
Guarantee of safe water is a right (as given by EPA regulations, etc)
But it is not a constitutional right
Because putting it where it doesn't belong, without any quantification, is meaningless
> Not everything you want - or need - is a right.
Ok, agreed. But safe drinking water, should maybe be one of the exceptions?
> And establishing a new right is not the only way to get what you want or need.
What's a better way to guarantee safe drinking water to everyone?
> safe drinking water, should maybe be one of the exceptions?
If we invert it to the actual reality (many places have unsafe drinking water), then we get "the right to avoid being poisoned by your government".
It sounds obvious to me that that should already be the case.
But I don't know much about water treatment. Maybe it isn't always feasible?
Do people just have to drink bottled water in some places? Or get reverse osmosis filters?
But maybe it should be? What does it say about the US government apparatus and its basic claims to legitimacy if it can't even guarantee safe drinking water? What lack of aspiration and ambition does such a denial demonstrate? Why should its citizens accept such an abdication of even the most basic duties?
You're not making an argument there. The people, through the government, chooses what is a right and what isn't. Not you alone. Clean drinking water seems pretty fucking important to me, and to a lot of other people too, it seems.
The authorities assuring that the drinking water that is sold to you is really of drinking water grade is the most basic of the basic rights. Not a luxury. The "right to culture almonds" or to have a pool is a different question.
What is drinking water for then, if not for drinking?
Stop editing your ridiculous comment.
Rights are enshrined by society, it’s what we choose. Nothing is a right in and of itself contrary to what your comment tries to imply.
The natural state of being is freedom, it up to society to restrict what they deemed necessary and punish the offenders. Unless the body of water or reservoir are claimed by the government then it is free for anyone to use, quality notwithstanding. Safe, clean water implies certain amount of processing and I agree that unless it is explicitly written then it is up to the users to sanitize that water
Election integrity and plugging birthright citizenship are two bigger issues that require constitution amendments.
"Plugging"? You mean "fundamentally altering the self-perception of the country founded on immigration"?
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.
Still not that simple:
> The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity, and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices - a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis”
The constitutional question (and note that state Constitutions, e.g. Massachusetts, may instead cover it) is just one piece of the mess.
Where is the constitution does it say the state can't do that?
We would ask you to rephrase - and, if we interpreted correctly, to reread.
"We"? Yeah, okay, Your Highness.
As for the content: the law says what it says. Where in the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments does it say that a state government must be truthful about public health statements?
The law says what it says. A behavior might be rotten, evil, illegal under other documents, and an all-round bad idea and still not a violation of, in particular, the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments
The gp points out that some states, (for example, Massachusetts) opt to put this in their own constitutions
But not Mississippi evidently, or the court probably would've mentioned that and Mother Jones reporter Sophie Hurwitz would've mentioned that in the article. Maybe Mississippi should enact some kind of state constitutional provision asserting this, but they haven't.
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 argument is the choice of the plaintiff. It’s not the role of the judge to argue the plaintiff’s case and find the most compelling argument.
What I'm saying though, is that he has room enough to interpret things so that a dismissal isn't necessary.
It isn't the job of the courts to make minimal rulings and avoiding all substantial questions, but to solve disputes. Here we have a case where the government has harmed people in a way that would be a tort if it had been done by anybody else, and people arguing that the government by doing so breached a right. There is presumably a right which can be interpreted as guaranteeing that people's bodies won't be messed with, or things in the US would be quite strange, so there's room to do something useful here, and the judge's choice is not forced.
The judge can only rule on the arguments and evidence presented in their court.
Exactly, unless they ignore that and decide based on precedent. But after we fence them in with arguments, evidence, AND precedence then surely.. oh nope, they could ignore those things and talk about reliance interest! I'm sure someone wrote down exactly how much reliance interest is "sufficient" to justify doing something else though. No? Gosh it sounds like a rigorous process and all but I'm starting to think maybe they just do whatever they want
This is something that is always fundamentally misunderstood. Of course, judges can extend courtesy but most modern systems are designed on pretty much the accuser arguing their case against the defender with the judge deciding based on law plus arguments presented in court.
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.
> Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
Nah, headline is optimistic actually: no right to clean water, to water tests, or to the truth about the tests if they occur. No right to healthcare, schools, or even deliverable mail either. But surely some of these are just the kind of thing you might expect as an absolute minimum everywhere if you have to pay taxes.
Sorry, I think your pull quote is actually contradicting your gloss. Again, the pull quote states that it doesn’t infringe any constitutional right, not that it doesn’t infringe any rights granted for any other reason?
Cool cool, I can see you've got a sharp eye for detail my friend but let's really get down to it. What exactly is it that you really want to defend here? Why do you want to defend it? And more to the point, do you like drinking clean water? Do you think people should have it or not?
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.
By this logic, state employees and elected officials, who are themselves US citizens, have the right to say anything at all to the public, including blatant lies about public health issues, because there's no specific legal exception banning them from doing so.
As government representatives, they’re limited to the behavior that the Constitution grants to the government. Here’s an explainer to said Constitution you may find useful: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec...
After reading that, please do tell where the power to poison water and lie about it is granted to the government, and the members of that government.
On the other hand it means that states can just not do that and leave their citizens without clean drinking water.
Does it? I think that conclusion requires observing additionally that all federal law also fails to grant a right to safe drinking water, doesn’t it?
Many municipal water systems are wholely in one state. Does the Constitution grant Congress the right to control municipal water quality?
Also it's kind of a moot point if federal law has not granted that right and does not seem likely to.
Page 2 second paragraph."Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing .." https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
Yes
> Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing tort claims, electing representatives who will better manage the public-water system, and petitioning their representatives for other remedies.
which is easier said than done.
From outside of US this seems extremely ass backwards.
The headline look pretty accurate to me. Under this ruling, being a US citizen does not guarantee you a constitutional right to safe drinking water; that right would depend on state legislation.
I think the bigger deal is that the people of Jackson were lied to and this sets the precedent that there is no recourse. It's not like someone in Flint knowingly drank contaminated water, the city withheld the fact that their water was contaminated with unsafe levels of lead.
As the article says, the situation in Jackson was deplorable; and it is indeed mind-boggling (to my puny European mind) that the same constitution which grants freedom of speech and the press was also not intended to grant the right to receive only believed-correct information from the government. But the ruling, for example, is not quoted as making any mention of any federal laws? The headline may be true for all I know, but the article provides only evidence for its truth about one particular source of 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.
I am out of words for this comment section.
I'm not sure what a right to water really means.
A lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells and you pay for them yourself.
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.
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 and does it make a difference if the poisoner is state, federal or private?
(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.)
> I'm not sure what a right to water really means.
Right to safe water. It means that the water in your kitchen faucet is expected/guaranteed to be safe to drink.
It must not have: noxious bacteria causing diarrhea, or liver parasite eggs, or mud, or mercury/heavy metals, or remains of faeces, or fracking methane, or pesticides, or medicines, or obesogens [1].
It must had been professionally filtered and treated to assure that none of those reach your home.
If you pay for water classified as "drinking water", you should not receive grey water, soapy bubbles, oily mud or anything else. This is the standard in all first country nations and I assume that it should be the same in US.
[1] 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.
> 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.
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
~ 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...> that "right to life" section of the Constitution
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.
The first paragraph of tfa:
> 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.
Could we please not? In the first sentence of the article:
> (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Surely you can see an issue there? Can we please make a collected effort to comment beyond 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 minimally 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’s your right to water. It means that because it’s something fundamental to human life, nations have an (at a minimum moral, often legal) obligation to provide it or protect access to 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.
It needs more qualifications IMO. "reasonable access" perhaps? I mean how would you handle someone who drives their car into the desert or climbs to the top of a mountain and demands water?
> It needs more qualifications IMO.
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.
"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.
I hope an analyst e.g. from the umbrella of Eugene Volokh will write about this case.
So from now on you can safely assume your government is lying (especially the current administration). Worrisome...
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docu...
Laudato Si' by Pope Francis: On Care for Our Common Home
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.
> 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.
America voted for unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism not just once but twice. They knew what MAGA and Project 2025 were about, both announced their intentions clear as day, and now they're getting unrestrained rabid turbocapitalism - a world where corporations can do whatever the hell they want and people either have no rights at all or the rights they have on paper are de facto meaningless.
Can’t really see how it can be reigned in and once it’s done with America it’s coming for everyone else. Australia with one nation and UK with reform for example.
My honest assessment is the tech bros felt threatened from potential regulation and decided to do use their platforms and influence to encourage more of the same destruction everywhere else. I cannot explain it any other way. Why would nearly all of them have backed the orange boy ?
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".