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You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

motherjones.com

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Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#71

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

themgt wrote: post #30

Plaintiffs ... seek recognition of two new constitutional rights lacking any foundation in the history and tradition of our Nation—the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials. 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 misunderstandin…

Generally, I've seen courts derive this kind of right from general rights like "the state cannot just arbitrarily kill or maim you", which (hopefully) are explicitly written down. So it doesn't feel that unreasonable to ask the court to specify that "the state cannot just arbitrarily kill or maim you" extends to "the state cannot arbitrarily lie to you in ways that will endanger your life/health".

Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#72

Post by gpvos »

themgt wrote: post #30

Plaintiffs ... seek recognition of two new constitutional rights lacking any foundation in the history and tradition of our Nation—the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials. 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 misunderstandin…

The first one I can understand from history (although I do not agree for modern times). But the right to accurate information from public officials, I thought that was indeed an absolute and basic right in a democracy, and it should very strongly be and always have been. (Exceptions like "national security" notwithstanding, and those should probably be more narrowly restricted than they are now.)

Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#73

Post by IsTom »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #45
IsTom wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand it means that states can just not do that and leave their citizens without clean drinking water.

Page 2 second paragraph."Rather, the remedy for Plaintiffs’ injuries lies in pursuing .." https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...

Yes

> 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.

Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#74

Post by latexr »

randyrand wrote: post #48
latexr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we please not? In the first sentence of the article: > (…) 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 mat…

It needs more qualifications IMO. "reasonable access" perhaps? I mean how would you handle someone who drives their car into the desert or climbs to the top of a mountain and demands water?

> It needs more qualifications IMO.

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.

Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#75

Post by im3w1l »

petcat wrote: post #42
impossiblefork wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying though, is that he has room enough to interpret things so that a dismissal isn't necessary. 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.…

The judge can only rule on the arguments and evidence presented in their court.

Does that mean you can build precedents with "matchfixing"? Like pay the plaintiff under the table to throw his case by presenting really bad arguments? And then subsequent cases must reference that result?

Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#76

Post by impossiblefork »

petcat wrote: post #42
impossiblefork wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying though, is that he has room enough to interpret things so that a dismissal isn't necessary. 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.…

The judge can only rule on the arguments and evidence presented in their court.

Yes, of course, but he interprets the arguments and evidence presented to them.

Here he chooses to interpret what they say as demanding the recognition of a new constitutional right to safe water and to correct information. It is not at all clear that that's a good choice.

He could equally well interpret the situation by analogy: the government deliberately tricked people into drinking unsafe water, and people were, depending on whether there is evidence of poisoning from the lead, either provably or not provably harmed.

Thus it is open to him to interpret their question as one that is not so focused on novel constitutional rights.

Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#77

Post by Amezarak »

ianjbutler wrote: post #44
Smaug123 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I think your pull quote is actually contradicting your gloss. Again, the pull quote states that it doesn’t infringe any constitutional right, not that it doesn’t infringe any rights granted for any other reason?

Cool cool, I can see you've got a sharp eye for detail my friend but let's really get down to it. What exactly is it that you really want to defend here? Why do you want to defend it? And more to the point, do you like drinking clean water? Do you think people should have it or not?

Speaking for GP, I want to have both a reasonable legal system and safe, clean drinking water.

We can have both, and the former precludes the idea that plaintiffs and judges can simply invent new fundamental rights that require enormous sums of money and labor to implement without any democratically designed framework because they're a good idea.

We have a route to do this, it's legislation and regulation. Note that in this particular case, while these things did not work perfectly - the Jackson water system had a lot of well-reported problems, and the lawsuit was filed in response to that - there's been hundreds of millions poured into remediating the problem. It is not simply being "ignored". People are not doing "nothing." The EPA, MSDH, and Jackson authorities have been working on the problem, not ignoring it because it's not a Constitutional right. In late 2025 the work resulted in the Jackson water supply once again meeting Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.

Here is the latest comprehensive water quality report, on a reporting website that the DOJ, EPA, and courts forced JXN to create:

https://jxnwater.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/JXNWater-202...

Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#78

Post by Brian_K_White »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #60
kstrauser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US Constitution, by itself, grants US citizens everything as a right, then enumerates the exceptions to those all-encompassing rights carved out as necessary for the operation of a government. 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…

By this logic, state employees and elected officials, who are themselves US citizens, have the right to say anything at all to the public, including blatant lies about public health issues, because there's no specific legal exception banning them from doing so.

They are only merely citizens outside of work, and they are indeed that free but only during those times.

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.

Re: You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules

#79

Post by softwaredoug »

earth-tattoo wrote: post #67
themgt wrote: post #30

Plaintiffs ... seek recognition of two new constitutional rights lacking any foundation in the history and tradition of our Nation—the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials. 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 misunderstandin…

[flagged]

There basically is no election fraud

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.

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