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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.
In saying “accurate information” there is a hidden presumption that not all government information needs to be shared. Forget about whether it’s accurate or not and who decides what’s accurate, just be maximally open
The framers discussed this in a few key ways, which resonate ALL TOO WELL with today:
Anti federalist Brutus 1 suggested that in a large republic, representatives will be too far removed from their constituents. Because citizens cannot personally observe public officials, the people "cannot be acquainted with their characters, know their motives, nor be informed of their proceedings." A lack of information would prevent citizens from holding officials accountable.
Anti federalist Centinel 1 directly warns against the manipulation of information by the wealthy elite, arguing that the public can easily be deceived by "well-born" politicians who mask their pursuit of tyranny behind noble rhetoric.
In Federalist 10 and 51 Madison argued alternatively (looks naive today) that a large, diverse republic makes it harder for corrupt politicians or factions to spread misinformation effectively across the entire nation.
In Federalist 70 Hamilton explicitly defended a single, powerful President because it provides accountability. With a single executive, the public knows exactly who to blame for bad policy or false statements, preventing officials from shifting blame or hiding behind an anonymous committee
But the Sedition Act passed only 10 years after the constitution made it illegal to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government, a restriction it could be argued that the government doesn’t even have in itself
Modern law of relevance include the Smith Mundt Act 1948 which prohibited the government from propagandizing its own people (limited to foreigners). The smith mundt “modernization” amendment crammed into NDAA 2012 did away with this restriction and now we have an explosion of govt-payroll influencers , news anchors, talking points memos etc that aren’t exactly…accurate
We have a very clear constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and yes, determining what that means is very fuzzy and always has been. Doesn’t make the right evaporate.
But even separating the two, the entire court system is literally designed to determine what’s true. From murder to false advertising, the courts exist to resolve disputes about what’s true.
If we’re saying they can’t or shouldn’t fulfill that role… what’s left? Just enforce the will of the current government, skipping all that stuff about testimony and fact-finding?
Generally speaking however, the law and especially the constitution is full of abstract and fuzzy concepts, and judges should have ample experience in adjudicating those, as well as balancing them against each other. And don't come to me with alt-right reasoning about what is accurate, true or false. Basic truth isn't too hard to determine.
The main thing is that there should be checks and balances, especially on the executive branch, and currently the US is dismantling them in bulk.
Previously agencies. Now everything bubbles up to the supreme court.
In many countries, both democratic and not, police can lie (e.g. to try to get a suspect make a mistake and expose some information).
That's a misunderstanding on your part. You can't have a "right to accurate information" because officials might simply be wrong. "Being wrong" can't be against the law. Additionally, people simply disagree about lots of things and often there's no procedure to resolve this.
However, you can't lie under oath, or in front of Congress. But lying is not the same as providing inaccurate information. In most other contexts, lying is legal.
I'm not sure how the hell anyone can excersize that right without accurate info from the government.
These headlines is just press fodder for the grievances-industrial-complex to cry about how the gov is incompetent
Of course drinking water is important - I'm not questioning that
But there's a difference between a meaningless statement of "everybody should have the right to cleaning water" which is a vapid statement and actually building towards it (with regulation on the quality of water, EPA, working on water treatment, etc)
"Right to cleaning water" is like saying "you should move more" to a fat person
And establishing a new right is not the only way to get what you want or need.
In 2020 Trump admin tried very hard to find some and there attempts were thrown out in court 59/60 cases
The only thing they won on involved a Pennsylvania judge extending mail in ballot deadline beyond their authority. Not a case of fraud.
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.
The victims can sue the city/state. They might already be doing so in parallel. And honestly that’s the only way to be made whole: these city officials don’t have the tens of millions that would be required to compensate victims. This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
The government cannot have a responsibility to provide every person with water, since some people will choose to live in places which are incompatible with that mandate.
But if the government does provide water, it must be clean.
It’s just the government holding itself to its own standard —— if my bottle of Pepsi turned out to have lead in it, the EPA would go to the ends of the earth to pull every bottle from the shelf until the company fixes it. We should expect nothing less from the water in our pipes.
So it's normal for a judge to have decided this way. Doesn't mean "Americans don't like clear water"
The other thing annoying about the article is the racial angle. The author goes out of her way to mention that the affected town is heavily African American. She doesn't mention that the list of officials that are named as the defendants (including the mayor) are also African American. I am not sure either fact is actually significant, but it's annoying to only have half the story mentioned.
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.
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.
Also it's kind of a moot point if federal law has not granted that right and does not seem likely to.
> 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.
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.
It's not unique in that.
Bad-faith pollution of truth is a new legal concept, and only a few countries have explicit legal protections against it.
The UK had a case a few years ago where this was tested, the judgement was "Well, if we expected our politicians to tell the truth, where would that end, nyuck nyuck nyuck?"
It's actually a tacit assumption that politicians and representatives lie, the media lie, and this is how things are.
There are proposals in the UK and Wales to change this. My guess is they won't get anywhere near explicit approval in the UK. They might in the Welsh Senedd.
Meanwhile the US has Fox claiming that it's an 'entertainment' channel, and no one should expect truth or honesty from it.
As water consumer, I have a right not to trust officials about tap water quality, and buy my own drinking water in plastic bottles!
I use Jackson example, everytime someone pushes "tap water is safe" bs!
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.
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.
When they are at work acting as the state, they are the state and their actions are limited to the rights of the state.
This should not have been something that needed explaining.
I am out of words for this comment section.
A lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells and you pay for them yourself.
(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.)
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...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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> (…) 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.
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. We can only do what’s within our means.
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.
" “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
"Right" is the wrong word here. I think it's entirely correct that you have no "right" to clean or safe drinking water.
You have a right to persue that and all your other needs.
And you have a right to tell the government (collectively) to make drinking water a goal, collect taxes to pay for it, and issue mandates to whatever organizations needed to be responsible for making it happen.
Presumably all of that was already in effect since a long time ago, and the problem is various people not doing their jobs in good faith.
Somewhere along the way the people voted for officials who would establish safe municiple water. Somewhere along the way officials set the goals and hired the contractors and set up ongoing operation & maintainance, and that all involved some sort of official mandate with terms and goals written down. And somewhere along the way one or more people are guilty of not performing a duty they were responsible for.
We may not, but we should, have a right to good faith discharge of duties.
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.
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 ?