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.”
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.
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
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 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.