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

randyrand

I'm not sure what a right to water really means. A lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells and you pay for them yourself.

impossiblefork

I think this is a ruling that's hard to justify. There are many frameworks under which the judge could have chosen to rule, it could be treated as assault, or some type of aggravated assault/battery, if the lead can be measured in the people who consumed it, it could be treated as fraud, since the water is presumably sold, etc. and reasoning about that it would ordinarily be a punishable tort would make it clear that the government can't impose that sort of thing either, just as it can't send anyone out to punch people.

Smaug123

Misleadingly provocative headline, right? The actual ruling from the article is that the US Constitution does not by itself grant US citizens that right. As the article itself points out, there’s nothing stopping other agreements from granting the right, and indeed several states do so explicitly.

metalman

Guess what folks, you now have anti rights.Sometimes I hate America and some americans for the bad things they do, but not like that. A good deal of what america is doing to itself these days looks just as insane as what they are doing to other countrys, or at least other countrys that are not doing it to themselves. There used to be metaphors about poison, and wells, but no one imagined that is could or would leap past that, and become ledgislated policy.

mbeavitt

This headline is not correct. The ruling was that a constitutional lawsuit was not successful, not that the the US government has carte blanche to poison its citizens drinking water… 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.

lukan

"Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.” " " “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.

themgt

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 misunderstanding of how the US government is designed to work. Closed by Fifth Circuit as WONTFIX, file request for constitutional amendment (RFC) if desired.

ButlerianJihad

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docu... 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.

shevy-java

The judge evidently is just a tool employed by Trump - against the people. Interesting that there may still be anyone who is not super-rich be a supporter of Trump if you give them factual evidence like this here. But ignoring this for the moment, the judge says that damage by drinking is exempt from other damage. This makes no sense. Even the USA has protection laws against harm. For instance, liability claims of medical damage and what not; even with the current administration, e. g. damage caused by a vaccine (in rare cases). So the judge is totally inconsistent here - the argument that damage via contaminated water should not be considered, makes objectively no sense. AI would do a better job than this "judge".

lampe3

Crazy that the comments are about the title and the how the legal system should work or does not work but no one cares if the water they need to survive is drinkable or not. I am out of words for this comment section.

ReptileMan

The armchair lawyer in me thinks that this is as clearcut state issue as possible. Why is federal even involved?

Brian_K_White

You can have any number of mandates that aren't state or federal constitutional rights. "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.

Eddy_Viscosity2

US courts have no problem inventing new rights for sitting US presidents. But if the people want something, they can just go die in a ditch (full of contaminated water, while being lied to about it by government officials). Classic USA.

drfloyd51

This is the signal the the government no longer serves the people. Delivering water is a basic government function. If they won’t make water a right, expect large numbers of dead.

alexfromapex

Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator had come to replace water, virtually everywhere. Water, the basic component of all life, had been deemed a threat to Brawndo's profit margin.

openasocket

Ok, so the article buries a lot of the context here. To clarify: plaintiffs can 100% sue the city for this under tort law (I believe the clean water act, but there’s probably other causes of action). This particular case was about suing the city officials in their personal capacity. So making those individuals pay, instead of/in addition to the city. Government officials are generally protected under qualified immunity. One exception to qualified immunity is 42 USC 1983: deprivation of rights under color of law. But that requires them to prove that these officials violated some constitutional right, beyond just some statute. 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.

xyzelement

A pretty bad article. In the American system we constantly test the boundaries of legal definition and it makes sense to test whether "how a water system is managed by a town" and "the right to bodily integrity are overlapping or not, and which way the decision falls is not aprioi obvious. 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.

iambateman

I think there is a difference between a right to safe drinking water and a right to provided water which is safe. 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.

tzs

The article makes it sound like this was a ruling from one judge. In fact it was a 15 judge panel. The article is talking about the majority ruling, which was joined by 10 judges. The judge they name is the judge the chief judge assigned to write the majority opinion. 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...

beej71

It is a little weird that the government is allowed to distribute for sale a poisonous product without warning consumers, but private industry is not.