So a federal appeals court just ruled that you, an American citizen, do not have a constitutional right to safe drinking water. Read that twice. Let it sink in. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision written by Trump-appointed Judge Kurt Engelhardt, tossed out a lawsuit from residents of Jackson, Mississippi, who say their city knowingly fed them lead-contaminated water for years. Engelhardt’s reasoning? “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing.” The deprivations, he wrote, “while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
Grievous. But not unconstitutional. The government can poison your kids and lie about it, and the highest law of the land says that’s just tough luck.
The lawsuit, filed in 2022, laid out a timeline that should make every official involved swing from a lamppost politically, if not literally. In 2015, the Mississippi State Department of Health found elevated lead levels in Jackson’s water. They sat on that information for six months. Six months. While families kept filling sippy cups and boiling pasta with water that was quietly wrecking their children’s brains. Then the EPA ran its own tests in 2020 and found “persistent and concerning violations” throughout the system. Leaks, corrosion, high lead. The whole works. And nobody, not the city, not the state, not the feds, lifted a finger to fix it.
Photographed by Roy Adkins. (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsPlaintiff Priscilla Sterling’s children have been diagnosed with lead poisoning. Lead poisoning causes permanent brain damage. A quarter of Jackson’s population is children. Jackson is more than 80 percent Black and has a poverty rate double the national average. Draw your own conclusions about whose water gets poisoned in this country and whose doesn’t.
Engelhardt went further than just the water. He said there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.” So the government can lie to your face while your kids drink poison, and the Constitution has nothing to say about it. That’s not a narrow legal holding. That’s a permission slip.
And here’s where you start connecting the dots, because the timing is almost too perfect to be coincidental. On the very same Friday this ruling came down, Trump’s EPA released a new rule to further gut the Clean Water Act. The court says you have no right to clean water. The EPA says it’s going to weaken the rules that protect clean water. Two branches of the federal government, moving in lockstep, on the same day, toward the same destination. You’d have to be asleep not to see the pattern.
Jim Murphy from the National Wildlife Federation put it plainly: if we don’t protect streams and wetlands, the cost of dirtier water “will flow downstream to households at a time when most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.” He’s right, and he’s being polite about it. The people who drink this water are not the people writing these rules. The people writing these rules have bottled water delivered to their offices. They have filtration systems in their homes that cost more than a Jackson resident makes in a month. They will never drink from a tap they don’t trust. That’s the whole game.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Europe District from Wiesbaden, Germany (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThe establishment wants you to believe this is just how the law works. Narrow precedent, careful reasoning, hands tied. But the law is written by people who benefit from the law being narrow. The courts are staffed by the same elite pipeline that staffs the agencies and the legislatures. They all went to the same schools, attend the same dinners, and drink the same clean water that you pay for and don’t get.
Nine states have a constitutional right to clean water. Uruguay has it. South Africa has it. But the United States of America, richest country on earth, does not. And a federal judge just told you that’s by design, not accident.
Your water is not your right. Your government can lie to you about it. And nobody in power thinks that’s a problem.