Oh no, they can end your life too. But only after due process. Thus a death sentence requires a trial and appeals and so on and so forth and takes ages to actually get to the execution. Just keep in mind that chronic lead poisoning does not cause death or even shorten lives. It only reduces IQ and causes behavioral and cognitive disabilities.
If you want safe drinking water you have to provide it yourself. Either dig your own well, or band together with your neighbors to have municipal water. Or buy drinking water from a private company; lots of people in the US do that. Europeans are frequently shocked to learn this, but ironically private water companies have a better track record for safety than municipal water systems. We are, after all, talking about a contamination case involving a municipal water system rather than a private one.
If you dig your own well then you are responsible for ensuring that it remains safe. Regular testing and maintenance is entirely your responsibility. Of course you are allowed to delegate to a contractor, but ultimately the responsibility rests entirely on your shoulders.
If you subscribe to a municipal water system then the responsibility rests on the municipality. You will be electing someone to run the water system. Choose wisely. Your vote has actual physical safety consequences for you and your children. Furthermore you may want to write local ordinances that govern the behavior of this type of elected officials. You might want to be able to rely on them making truthful statements, for example. If so then you should put that in writing in your municipal ordinances. Many states and cities have already done just that! Off hand I don’t know if Mississippi or the city of Jackson have.
Similarly we also have laws and ordinances against the government poisoning people. It is usually illegal, in most jurisdictions, in most circumstances. We also have laws against negligence that leads to harms such as poisoning people.
Just because something isn’t in the Constitution doesn’t mean it’s legal. In this case people seem to have heard that safe drinking water isn’t guaranteed in the Constitution and jumped to the ridiculous conclusion that the government can poison people whenever it wants with no consequences.
The Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights and other amendments, is mostly a list of things that the government is not allowed to take away from the people or other parts of the government. It’s not a list of all desirable things that the people want governments to do.
> Oh no, they can end your life too. But only after due process.
Yes, that's the point. There was not any sort of due process here.
> If you want safe drinking water you have to provide it yourself. Either dig your own well, or band together with your neighbors to have municipal water.
This was municipal water.
> If you subscribe to a municipal water system then the responsibility rests on the municipality.
And this ruling is letting them escape the responsibility.
And do you not understand the process? The plaintiff brings a lawsuit arguing that the defendant did a bad thing. They make multiple claims about laws that were broken. The judge may throw out any or all of those claims. Most lawsuits lose at least one. In this case one of the claims was that the municipal water district violated their 14th amendment rights. That one got thrown out. The plaintiffs appealed and the this is their appeal being denied.
I haven’t actually read the original lawsuit, but there’s no way that they were dumb enough to make only that one claim against the water district. They’ll still have their claims about negligence and so on and so forth. It’ll go to trial eventually, or the district will settle. Losing this claim does not let the district escape their responsibility.
When I worked at EFF, I read a lot of news coverage (and forum discussions) of litigation, sometimes including litigation that I was working on. It was often very hard to get people to see larger context about issues like
* in the course of a court case, a judge (or multiple judges from multiple courts) are asked to make many different decisions on many different legal issues; most of those don't end or determine the outcome of the overall case
* indeed, some of the decisions are about minor issues and others are about major issues
* some of the issues presented in a case may be "questions of first impression" where no court has ever addressed them before; these are potentially very important as a matter of precedent because they might affect how similar questions are viewed in other cases
* other issues may be very longstanding or familiar ones
* lawyers may be willing to bring cases with different degrees of novelty (e.g. relying entirely on an untested theory, or not!), and with different likelihoods of success
* legal standards will often have many different elements, and one party may lose under a standard even though it met most of the elements (but not all of them)
All of these are more complex from the natural impulse to say "hooray, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the good guys!" or "boo, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the bad guys!".
I don’t like it, but you’re probably right. It is evident that many commenters have treated this story as a catastrophe that proves that the government is out to get them rather than a temporary setback for the plaintiffs and the obvious consequence of a logical overreach.
If you want safe drinking water you have to provide it yourself. Either dig your own well, or band together with your neighbors to have municipal water. Or buy drinking water from a private company; lots of people in the US do that. Europeans are frequently shocked to learn this, but ironically private water companies have a better track record for safety than municipal water systems. We are, after all, talking about a contamination case involving a municipal water system rather than a private one.
If you dig your own well then you are responsible for ensuring that it remains safe. Regular testing and maintenance is entirely your responsibility. Of course you are allowed to delegate to a contractor, but ultimately the responsibility rests entirely on your shoulders.
If you subscribe to a municipal water system then the responsibility rests on the municipality. You will be electing someone to run the water system. Choose wisely. Your vote has actual physical safety consequences for you and your children. Furthermore you may want to write local ordinances that govern the behavior of this type of elected officials. You might want to be able to rely on them making truthful statements, for example. If so then you should put that in writing in your municipal ordinances. Many states and cities have already done just that! Off hand I don’t know if Mississippi or the city of Jackson have.
Similarly we also have laws and ordinances against the government poisoning people. It is usually illegal, in most jurisdictions, in most circumstances. We also have laws against negligence that leads to harms such as poisoning people.
Just because something isn’t in the Constitution doesn’t mean it’s legal. In this case people seem to have heard that safe drinking water isn’t guaranteed in the Constitution and jumped to the ridiculous conclusion that the government can poison people whenever it wants with no consequences.
The Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights and other amendments, is mostly a list of things that the government is not allowed to take away from the people or other parts of the government. It’s not a list of all desirable things that the people want governments to do.