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.”
If only the US had integrated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into law. It’s only 78 years old. Guess they haven’t had time yet.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services,
That is some 3rd World shit right there. Hire a plumber to reroute that asswipe’s water supply.
What exactly do Americans have the right to…?
Guns. We have the right to guns.
But only some times…
Lightly cup Trump’s balls
Nothing unless it’s in the constitution. Judge is technically correct.
We should probably change that.
Well, yes and no.
Technically, several rights not listed in the constitution are guaranteed to the States or the people by the 10th Amendment. Which, I guess by default makes it in the Constitution?
Spend money so the rich can get richer.
Nothing unless they are rich.
The right to claim that they have rights.
Ofc not. This colony was founded by literal enslavers. It’s hard to enslave a comfortable population with their basic needs met. No water, no food, no shelter, no healthcare… Instead it’s “freeze peach” and corporate personhood.
Oh, it was a conservative deciding this. This tracks.
Then what is the point of governance?
In the USA? To protect and serve the rich.
to build roads and maintain the world’s strongest defensive military, of course. y’know, the things people need?
people don’t need safe drinking water, duh
Because fuck the common good, 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.
“old” america is never coming back. it never was. and by ‘old’ i mean like cold war or obama era, not racist sexist 30’s/40’s/50’s america.
this ‘new’/currrent america might stick around for a bit, but it will be strained. it will get to a point where this new america fully breaks and ceases to exist (full civil war 2) and the country will be broken up. either into 2 new countries or breaking completely and all the states becoming their own country, which will invoke more war as states (and even other countries) fight each other for land and resources.
‘mostly’ world paece was amazing while it lasted. but billionairs didn’t make enough money
America will never be what it was.
What it was isn’t as “great” as the stories Americans tell themselves.
They need to build back better.
Not great but honestly not suprised.
“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’m sure Coke and Pepsi will also be happy to sell you bottled water priced at whatever the market will bear.
they want flint to be repeated in every state.
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.
This is similar to my take on roe v wade. The supreme Court looked at the constitution and said “oh, there’s abortion, right there”. It was inevitable it would get overturned because it’s not actually in the constitution anywhere. The Dems had 50 years to pass an actual federal law and failed.
Yep. Now, it should be mentioned that clean drinking water SHOULD be a constitutional right, but that’s a matter for an amendment, not for a judge to unilaterally decide.
Of course. But yeah that’s not the judge’s purview
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.
Nah, for judges I really think money is just a good extra. It’s about feeling powerful, the kinds of power people want are different so some become cops, some politicians, some influencers, and some judges etc. The importance of the money aspect in all those varies as much between each kind and each person. I think many begin with mostly money in mind but the need for power over others quickly takes over.
They get appointed.
By other spineless, soulless morons.
Given there’s no apparent resistance I lack evidence of an opposing group.
Because the political system intrinsically defaults to a two party system making it very easy to entrench the two parties and create controlled opposition, which then works to squash actual resistance.
You can see it in action right now within the democratic party where a certain group of people would rather see them lose elections than support candidates who are looking to oppose the status quo.
Only an asshole could look at this situation and come up with a post blaming Democrats.
I would suggest you do better but let’s face it, you can’t and likely never will.
I’m sorry, is the entire American political system “Democrats”? I said the entire system is rotten. I only used democrats as an example because that’s literally the most recent example. I could’ve used the tea party as a republican example but why use a 15 year old example when there’s an example happening right now?
Perhaps instead of telling me to do better you should be telling that to the establishment democrats who are not just against the DSA but also Abdul El-Sayed, who isn’t even a socialist. Perhaps the one who should be doing better is you?
OK now you’re just making shit up.
The first thing that happened after Abdul won his primary was the entire fucking establishment endorsed him.
So you’re either a liar or completely misinformed. Let us know which, thanks.
Not that it matters because you’ll just fucking lie about that answer, too.
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.
Not sure why I have to be the person in this thread to explain basic civics to everyone, but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is from the Declaration of Independence, it is not in the US Constitution.
The Declaration is not law, it was just a declaration. You can’t cite it like this, that’s not how it works.
It’s actually in section 1 of the 14th amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Life, liberty, or property. No pursuit of happiness to be found.
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
