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.”
Yeah lets wrap this US gov up at this point. No right to clean water and the truth lol.
You will drink sludge and accept our lies like the good little American sheep you are.
In some parts of the world, people are thinking about UBI.
In other parts of the world, having safe drinking water is put into question.
Elections have consequences, everyone who stayed home and allowed Trump to be elected to two terms has enabled this.
I honestly don’t know if the US will actually be able to recover from those 6 (and counting) years, as an Aussie it feels like we’re watching the equivalent of the Fall of Rome in real time.
That bastard has managed to isolate you from your allies, line his pockets with billions of dollars, nearly bankrupt your country, destroy your military credibility, pollute your water, air & food, roll back your rights, and so much more.
It will take at least a generation to undo this damage, and I don’t think there’s enough political will to do what would need to be done to arrest this decline.
You will likely fall into oligarchy, to become another Russia in my lifetime. Just another regional brute, living off the fear and intimidation you were able to impose on your glory years.
I think it depends on how you define “recover”. America will never be what it was.
This is pretty fucking obvious to anyone who has received a water bill.
A water bill is so the treatment plants can continue running at utmost capacity.
Should that just be tied into municipal taxes? Maybe. You’re not paying for clean water, you’re paying for the system and the people who help keep it clean.
That’s not the same, dumbass
Foreshadowing
It shouldn’t have been a “right to safe drinking water”, it’s an assumption of risk issue. The default setting in the US for a few generations is that the tap water is safe to drink. This reeeally smells like a malicious ruling.
Land of the Free motherfuckers!
they want flint to be repeated in every state.
“Oh look at me, I’m an entitled American. I want water to drink and to not be lied to. Wha Wha Wha”
You give people this and they’ll start asking for healthcare next instead of just dying in the street with pride.
Bunch of greedy entitled fucks.
Who invited Steven Miller to this thread?
Steven Miller has probably never been invited to anything. He just pops out from around a corner or behind a bush and your heart stops beating for a second.
*Nestle enters the chat
I think there are enough history lessons about conflict in society which water are main issue or cause of that in the first place.
How do spineless, soulless morons become judges? There seems to be a lot of them.
Not to defend a trump judge, but it sounds like the ruling is simply that the constitution doesn’t guarantee the particular right in question. Which is true. There’s nothing in the constitution about this.
It’s a matter of environmental law, sanitation, public health, etc. I’m sure there are laws that this situation violated, but the fact is that the laws it broke weren’t in the constitution. So the plaintiff’s lawyer kinda messed up by making this case about some made-up constitutional right and not the specific laws that are on the books at the state or federal level.
The case shouldn’t be over. They just need to focus on laws that actually exist instead of some AI hallucinations about the constitution.
Money money money. This is when I can say America is finally in the medieval era. Healthcare for the kings/lords, diseases in everything including food and even the water can be poison. Just like the old days.
They get appointed.
By other spineless, soulless morons.
Well, he’s sorta right. It’s not explicitly in the text (though, one could argue it would maybe come from the 9th Amendment). The basis for the Clean Water Act and the EPA would arise out of Congress’s power to promote a general welfare combined with regulating interstate commerce.
the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
The judges there regularly issue decisions so far right even SCOTUS won’t get on board. “Fifth Circuit” really ought to be in the headline of articles about their ridiculous decisions. It’s the Fifth Circuit doing Fifth Circuit things.
Says right here, “Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.”
Without clean water there’s no life. With no life, there’s no liberty, and no pursuing happiness.
How do you “promote the general welfare” with filthy, poisonous water?
This is like the most fundamental thing, even Rome provided clean water. We’ve been surpassed by ancient Rome.
Yes, but- Someone forgot to transfer that line to the constitution. We’re all going to die or become bonded corporate slaves because of an administrative oversight.
Edit: on second thought, maybe the first one was a well-written a call to arms and they knew exactly what they were doing when they wrote the actual charter.
The preamble to US constitition has zero legal bearing on the US. There has never been a legal case in the US where “preamble based natural justice” was accepted as a legitimate basis for complaint. If your complaint was only based on the preamble, normal judicial practice would be to dismiss it as frivolous, and force you to pay defendants’ court costs.
That’s not even in the preamble of the constitution, that quote is from the Declaration of Independence. It also went on to say all men were created equal forgetting slavery
Well it does explain that the enumerated rights are a non-exclusive, non-exhaustive list. So while it doesn’t have any direct legal weight, it certainly explains how they expected the document to be interpreted
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Opening line of the Constitution. Pretty sure anything bold could be applied to safe, clean drinking water.
Conservatives have no concept of truth, justice, or rule of law. They wield the law as a weapon and ignore it when it suits them.
