Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/51603575
A Trump-appointed judge also said Americans have no “constitutional right to truthful information” during a public health crisis.
On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said.
“Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
removing drinkable water as a human right in order to prepare us for when there will be climate-caused water shortages so they can say “well we don’t have to provide it to you so technically we’re doing nothing wrong”
Pretty sure that lead is contrary to: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happines”
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The what now?
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I’m in Australia, please forgive my ignorance, Adam, Eve and their food aside, doesn’t the Constitution build on top of the Declaration of Independence and isn’t the pursuit of happiness etc. an inalienable right?
Next you’re going to tell me that what forms the basis of the USA government isn’t legally binding.
Actually no. I’ll give an example like a family. Let’s say you have a mother, a father, a brother and a sister. The kids don’t like that the parents are asking the kids to contribute to the household and the kids decide to move out(in this example it’s like the kids crashed the car and the parents needed to buy a new car but they were struggling to pay the mortgage with the new car payment forced on them by the kids crashing the old car) . The declaration of independence is the letter the kids leave for their parents informing them the kids are moving out. Technically it doesn’t matter, it was just an angry letter.
The kids then realize there should be certain rules regarding how new place is run, for example no kid should be able to tell another what they are allowed to say, the constitution. They also recognize certain things should not be allowed by any of the kids for example no smoking in the apartment, that’s federal law. Each kid disagree on certain things, maybe the sister says no eating in my bedroom, the brother says no bright light in my bedroom after 10pm. These rules only apply to their bedrooms though, that’s state law.
They also said e pluribus unum! I’m like 99% sure that means of many bank accounts, one. Mine. So they’re not honoring that either! Bunch of scammers…
That phrase isn’t part of the Constitution.
Unlike the phrase ‘a well-regulated militia’
At this rate no one will have to fight the US . They will kill themselves all off by unsafe food, water. Buildings codes, ICE offing everyone they please and so much more. Weird stuff.
i get that there is no constitutional right to clean drinking water, but there surely should be one with the water provider company (which is city-owned in this case).
Let them drink lead
If the government is legally allowed to poison you, they are allowed to do anything to you.
The Fifth Circuit is known for putting out many kinds of crazy decisions, but this is not one of them. There is genuinely no legal right to clean drinking water in US constitutional law. It’s just not something that anyone thought to include in it. And it’s also true when they say that not every bad government decision is unconstitutional. The courts should apply the law as it is written, not as what they would like it to say.
I would be surprised if there was any country in the world that places a right to clean drinking water in its constitution.
South African here, water and sanitation are rights in our constitution.
How’s the electricity situation there now? I heard a couple years or so ago that some cities were having blackouts almost everyday.
i’m not sure about south africa specifically, but many rural villages in south-sahara africa have faced regular blackouts or no grid power at all for decades. this is changing now as rural people in africa install a whole lot of solar panels on their roofs to provide their own power. no state grid needed. there’s tons of articles about this but i’m too lazy to search one rn.
They were planned black outs rather than failures (load management), but that all got fixed up.
I don’t know about all the constitutions but clean drinking water is officially a basic human right. See UN Resolution 64/292.
UN resolutions aren’t law. There’s a difference between what people have a moral right to and what people have a legal right to
I would vote for it, though.
Unfortunately the US Constitution is among the minority of liberal democratic constitutions where there is no popular vote involved in amending it.
yeah i agree. also it would be extremely impractical to guarantee a universal right to clean drinking water to everyone. consider that some crazy nutjob is gonna move to the middle of the arizona desert. there’s no sane way that the government could (somewhat economically efficiently) deliver clean drinking water there regularly. that would just go against any common human sense. people shouldn’t move to the desert, then complain there’s not enough water.
guaranteeing clean drinking water can only be guaranteed in states that have actually fertile soil and enough precipitation to provide that water.
