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.”
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