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.”
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:
Life, liberty, or property. No pursuit of happiness to be found.
You still can’t have any of those if you don’t have drinkable water.
Look, I’m not going to defend this bullshit decision, but humans survived millennia without regulated, clean, drinking water. Yes, some of the lucky ones had life, liberty, and maybe even some property.
They were drinking low % beer because it was safer. For literally thousands of years.
It was an absolute nightmare, and anyone with a working understanding of history knows exactly why we need regulated, clean, drinking water.
But unfortunately, here we are. A legislature that has abdicated it’s responsibility in prostrate to a mad king. With a Supreme Court with at least four justices, off the top of my head, that will have no issue poisoning our drinking water. And two more who could go either way.
The problem here is that things like beer will protect you from water born disease, but it will not offer any protection against lead, mercury, and many other heavy metals. Many of these pollutants are either new, or never occurred in as significant amounts as they do now. Also our world is getting hotter, and as a result, dehydration will become even more dangerous than before. The last thing you will want to drink during a heatwave is alcohol, even in small quantities. If you’re unlucky like me and can’t have alcohol, are especially sensitive to some of these metals, and dehydrate especially easily, then you’re royally screwed.
Yeah absolutely… We’ve gone so long without having to worry about sooooo much water-borne shit, that people don’t even realize.
Can’t wait for the mainstream return of dysentery and cholera
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