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.
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?
Second, courts must avoid intruding into the work of the political branches: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/political_question_doctrine. You can't turn to the courts to adjudicate what facts are "accurate" in the context of a political debate.
Generally speaking however, the law and especially the constitution is full of abstract and fuzzy concepts, and judges 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.
This isn't some newfangled "alt-right reasoning." Orwell criticized the "Ministry of Truth" half a century ago. More fundamentally, it reflects the U.S. Founders' axiomatic understanding that nobody can be trusted. They did not create a system where lawyers and judges are the "microkernel of the operating system," being trusted to perform critical functions such as "enforcing the law" and "deciding basic truths." Indeed, in the Founders' system, individuals can't even sue the government except in narrow circumstances with the government's consent.
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).
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
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.
But yes, a lengthy period with a unifying adversary that felt like an existential threat did a lot to unify the US
This is how you wound up with historically ethnic banks, universities, etc, etc. Black guy, pole, whatever, can't get a loan (well they can, at a "fuck you" price) from the wasp bank so they go to the lending group they know through their church or whatever. After a few years of that the guys who are doing that lending say fuggit, quit their day jobs and start a bank. Wash rinse repeat to varying extents for just about every sector business.
They'd never allow that today. The incumbents would get the enforcers to kill that before it becomes a legitimate standalone business. And the enforcers have a lot more ammo today because of past 70yr of (mostly civil) law and jurisprudence.
But any modern equivalent isn't done along racial/ethnic lines and so the useful idiots will think it's all fine and dandy and defend it out of one side of their mouth while complaining about a lack of opportunity out of the other.
Keep in mind the US government pre watergate did a lot of spying on political opponents (MLK, Malcolm X, etc). Presidents impounded funds pre Watergate at alarming rates.
We put US citizens in camps during WW2 for being of Japanese descent. See also native Americans and the Federal govts enforcement of slavery.
You might say the govt has just grown in proportion to the container it’s held in.
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 this case the state told the people that the water it was already providing was safe, when in fact it was contaminated with lead. This case was about a 1983 suit for state officials knowingly violating a constitutional right.
Few constitutional rights create affirmative responsibility for the state to provide for them. Pretty much just public defenders.
I think that perhaps you don't understand what a right means, in the context of government services.
But it is not a constitutional right
Because putting it where it doesn't belong, without any quantification, is meaningless
You forgot the actual argument about why this want and this way of getting it is a sign of incompetence
Ok, agreed. But safe drinking water, should maybe be one of the exceptions?
> And establishing a new right is not the only way to get what you want or need.
What's a better way to guarantee safe drinking water to everyone?
If we invert it to the actual reality (many places have unsafe drinking water), then we get "the right to avoid being poisoned by your government".
It sounds obvious to me that that should already be the case.
But I don't know much about water treatment. Maybe it isn't always feasible?
Do people just have to drink bottled water in some places? Or get reverse osmosis filters?
I actually got stuck on one such island once, for one night with my then-twelve-year-old. First thing we did after securing a place to sleep, was acquire water.
That would be really convenient for companies that sell bottled water
For example, if your tap water is poisonous, but you can get safe drinking water from a store, you right to safe drinking water would be satisfied by what the store provides.
I'd say the main issue in this story is that the danger was known, but not disclosed.
Rights are enshrined by society, it’s what we choose. Nothing is a right in and of itself contrary to what your comment tries to imply.
> Stop editing your ridiculous comment.
Your demand is ridiculous, doubly so in a conversation about rights.
The claim is that you have a 1983 case against state officials that tell you that the municipal water is clear when they know it is in fact contaminated with lead.
That is an ideological assertion, not a fact.
The US has regulations and they are enforced, with some local problems. Just like every other nation on Earth.
A right is not a guarantee of perfect outcomes.
Most countries do recognize the right, though implementation is obviously challenging. The US abstained, tellingly: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/687112?ln=en
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 9th makes it clear that not all rights need to be explicitly in the text.
As for the content: the law says what it says. Where in the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments does it say that a state government must be truthful about public health statements?
The law says what it says. A behavior might be rotten, evil, illegal under other documents, and an all-round bad idea and still not a violation of, in particular, the constitution of the United States of America and its amendments
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.
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.
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.
> Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law [...]
and what they said they had been deprived of is their substantive due process rights.
The plaintiffs brought a Constitutional argument. The court ruled on the Constitutional argument.
Isn't that even how the gas chambers at some extermination camps worked? They tell you it's showers and you go in "voluntarily"?
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.
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...
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!
Jackson gov was happy to poison people to save face and money. Some other people are happy to poison people with chlorine, to save on plastics.
As a consumer, I have a right to choose whatever I feel is safe for me!
Making tap water drinkable, while 99% gets used for utilities, is seen as wasteful.
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.
The other 5 judges wrote a separate opinion dissenting in part and concurring in part.
The article did do something quite well that way too many articles on court rulings fail to do. That is link to the actual ruling [1].
It is probably best to just read that directly if you want to actually understand what is going on.
[1] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
I am out of words for this comment section.
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.
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.
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
The largest accidental release of radioactivity in the United States did not occur in 1979 at Three-Mile Island. That very same year a collapsing dam released a flood of radioactive debris into the Navajo Nation.
'We didn't know we were poisoning ourselves': the deadly legacy of the US uranium boom
Tsosie was one of thousands of Navajos who took jobs in the mines, starting in the 1940s. They worked without masks or ventilation to disperse the lethal radon gas, and they were never told the rocks they were handling – leetso in the Diné language, or yellow dirt – were deadly.
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.
Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration used to think the opposite when they were at charge of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
Sadly EPA and FDA are being back-stabbed and slowly murdered by Republicans since 2025 (Yes, like with Voldemort, is important not to be afraid to say it loud). And the death by a thousand cuts had been surgically designed to destroy any capability to prosecute crimes related with the TSCA.
So if you live in USA you are alone on this. You better do your homework and learn as fast as you can. Scientific Journals are your friends. There is an incredible increase of unexpected knowledge about digestive regulation published since the 90's. Forget about miraculous fruits and start your journey with the adipokines.
Meanwhile the world keeps moving. In Europe, since Jan 2026, water suppliers will be required to comply with a parametric value of 2.5μg/L for BisPhenol-A in drinking water, after scientists discovered than it can leak in the hot-water faucets. People sometimes refill their teapots with hot water before to turn on the kitchen.
What is RFK up to lately? Any exciting changes? He found another racoon?
> 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
30. Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. This debt can be paid partly by an increase in funding to provide clean water and sanitary services among the poor. But water continues to be wasted, not only in the developed world but also in developing countries which possess it in abundance. This shows that the problem of water is partly an educational and cultural issue, since there is little awareness of the seriousness of such behaviour within a context of great inequality."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.
It would be fair if American workers showed even a little compassion and compensated the rest of the world for all the damage caused by their government that they elected.
The situation where the median salary in the United States is 40 dollars while it is less than 50 CENTS elsewhere in the world is sheer madness.
Obviously, it's hard to make trillion‑dollar corporations pay, but fairness is required at ALL levels. Even people who get the minimum wage in the US have a huge fair share they have to pay to the rest of the world, where workers earn less than 50 cents an hour.
Nothing prevents you from taking a 90% tax from these Americans and distributing it to those who need the money the most. People are forced to do harmful and dangerous jobs for 50 cents an hour or less but people who elect the American government prefer to do nothing about it. Even more, they put all the blame on the corporations that are hard to act against, while pretending themselves to be a victims. It's sheer hypocrisy.
I'm sorry, but no, you're not victims, you're just as much exploiter as your corporations. An American worker earning 13 dollars an hour in terms of living standards is absurdly closer to Elon Musk than to a tantalum mine worker in the Congo who earns 22 cents an hour so that this American worker can buy a new iPhone and whine online on how some people think they crazy because they have mutilated their genitals or something.
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 ?
It depends on if they click the link in the article to the actual ruling and read it. If they do all they will conclude is that the article's author is completely incompetent when it comes to writing on court rulings.
First, it was a ruling by 10 judges on a panel of 15, with the other 5 judges dissenting in part and concurring in part. The judge named in the article was the judge who the chief judge assigned the task of writing up the majority opinion.
Second, the court did not say those things that the crappy article made you think they said. Briefly, they said that the harms to the plaintiffs are not covered under the specific statute that plaintiffs used, which covers violations of certain Constitutional rights.
By the way this doesn't mean the plaintiffs are done. This is just their Constitutional claim. They also sued on various other grounds, such as state laws.
Those state claims had been dragged along into federal court due to supplemental jurisdiction, and so were dismissed by the lower federal courts when the Constitutional claims were dismissed, because with the federal claims gone the federal courts no longer had jurisdiction over the state claims. Such as dismissal is "without prejudice", which means plaintiffs can refile those in state court.