No constitutional right to clean water, federal court finds

The fourteenth amendment, specifically the due process clause at issue here, says that if the government exercises its power to deprive you of life, liberty, or property it must provide due process. In this case the government was not exercising such a power. It does not say that the government must provide clean water, in which case our understanding of what “clean” means would mirror the technological indifference of the aforementioned rights. Due process clause is just a really bad vehicle for this type of grievance.

The comparison to the 2nd also makes no sense. First, machine guns come up in arguments about reducing the scope of the 2nd whereas the argument here is about expanding the scope of the 14th.

Second, the 2nd is a lot clearer than the 14th. Pretty much every concrete right we get out of the 14th is either something that is inferred from it being generally recognized as an unstated right by the time the 14th was passed or has been found by arguing that it is implicit in the other more explicit rights (e.g., right to privacy as something you have to have to make some of the more explicit rights meaningful).

That statement is false. Repeating firearms like the Puckle gun predate the bill of rights by ~75 years.

More importantly, the Founders were hardly unfamiliar with privately owned military firepower. The Constitution expressly authorized Congress to grant letters of marque, and the government commissioned privateers to attack enemy shipping using their cannon-armed privately-owned warships.

If you want to change an amendment do it the correct way, repeal it.

The 2nd does not predate machine guns.

The 1st does predate the internet.

And none of these matter because the Constitution deals in principles not details.

"This guy was killed with a laser but the law against murder was written after clubs but predates lasers, so it doesn't apply and you can't call this a murder."

The ruling sounds correct to me but not because of anything to do with the date that any part of the constitution or ammendment was written.

- the US law making process is fundamental and deeply broken to a point of it feels comparable to the Weimar Republic (the Germany between WW1 and Hitler taking over, around it's end it was pretty much dysfunctional when it comes to passing laws)

- instead things which should be law changes, and should be pursued bipartisan, are squeezed into other things. Like the budged bill, wider interpretations(1) of the existing law etc.

- or bundled into absurdly large bills covering docents of things which should not be one bill (which is very un-democratic and likely harmful for the US citizens. It allows corrupt politicians to forces less corrupt ones to vote for bad laws, because they are bundled with very essential needed changes, it also has shown to pose a very realistic risk of "sneaking" in something bad etc.)

- other cases often get stuck or even for topics which should be bipartisan held hostage to push some other goals

- with the current president this seems to have gotten even worse as he and the people close to him have attacked changes otherwise pursued by a wider bipartisan support. So even iff you can onboard both sides it might not mean enough in this legislation. But while I'm pretty sure I have seen such cases I can't remember details, so take with a grain of salt.

- to add in on top of all of that: Consumer and environmental protection in the US has always been a bit weak, a bit too slow, and often lacking precautionary approaches (most thing being reactive to enough people suffering harm, even if it was clear for a long time that idk. a product isn't safe or similar). And in some aspects this has been further crippled by the current administration, but idk. if such aspects apply here. That means even iff the current state is caused by a crime, it likely will take years to make stop the criminal from committing it. If it's seen as a breach of constitution things likely would move faster, and corrupt local governments have a much harder time undermining it.

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(^1): Which isn't always bad, some degree of "vagueness" to handle the complexity of constant changing IRL is often desirable (as a dump example you also would make a law to forbid killing, instead of a law which explicitly lists and forbids every imaginable way you might kill someone). But what I mean goes far beyond that. In general some recognition of "basic human right" on a constitutional level should be something any citizen should ask their country to have. And I mean that independent of the international human rights court and the specific interpretation of human rights common with it. Not recognizing it is one thing, but insistently not recognizing any form of human rights is another, IMHO pretty evil, thing.

I would never understand this system. So to get repatriation on damage done a citizen has to mount an entire legal initiative. Even if the guilt is already proved. It just feels like a system where departments of government will only sue to fill their own budget next year.

Which certainly won't get thrown out over qualified immunity.

(And if they win a case against the city, it's coming out of their own pockets!)

Yeah, kinda genuinely terrifying to think about that timeline. That's how you get George Orwell's worst nightmares come true.

Still sounds like negative framing to me. And when those implicit non-declared rights are judged legally, they are still judged in a negative rights lens, no?

The right to legal counsel and jury are protections are still defensive in framing, though I concede your point. Access to education I would also concede is partially positive though you see it is about not denying.

I stand by my claim of "built on".

The opinion is asserting a government intentionally allowing lead poisoning does "not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right". That's an assertion that no such right exists.

> One is looking to see if the alleged right is deeply rooted in history and tradition and implicit in the idea of ordered liberty.

Hilariously, the "deeply rooted in history and tradition" test is, itself, not rooted in history and tradition. It was established in 2022!

That it doesn’t confer unlimited power is orthodox constitutional law. But the Preamble explicitly states the constitutional purposes that should guide the interpretation and exercise of the powers enumerated. And it doesn’t follow that the purposes it states are legally meaningless. The’re part of the constitutional text and inform how the powers actually conferred by the Constitution are construed. As Story commented:

“One of the best established rules of interpretation, one, which common sense and reason forbid us to overlook, is, that when the object of a power is clearly defined by its terms, or avowed in the context, it ought to be construed, so as to obtain the object, and not to defeat it. The circumstance, that so construed the power may be abused, is no answer. All powers may be abused; but are they then to be abridged by those, who are to administer them, or denied to have any operation? If the people frame a constitution, the rulers are to obey it. Neither rulers, nor any other functionaries, much less any private persons, have a right to cripple it, because it is according to their own views inconvenient, or dangerous, unwise or impolitic, of narrow limits, or of wide influence.”

Saying that those stated purposes should inform constitutional interpretation isn't a particularly novel idea. Pretending the ratified language at the beginning of the Constitution doesn't matter because taking it seriously might be inconvenient isn't a serious position either.

The possibility that judges can abuse constitutional interpretation is an argument for doing it carefully, not selectively. Or, as Joseph Story put it: "The circumstance, that so construed the power may be abused, is no answer. All powers may be abused."