Tuesday Top of Mind 9/8/26- You can lead a horse to water but you can’t constitutionally give it clean water

The three things that I knew with absolute certainty were in the Constitution were “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

I learned it in the third grade! This instruction was one of the founding blocks of my education.

This is what the Constitution says so it must be true.

Don’t be so quick to say that clean water is a foundational right of life.

I mean, it is, but a 5th Circuit Appeal judge ruled on Friday that a lawsuit from Jackson, Mississippi residents about tainted drinking water with high lead levels and other contaminants was right to be dismissed. The opinion also stated, with its whole chest, that “It is undisputed that the Constitution does not guarantee clean water.”

Read about this case; your blood will boil. I read articles by the Guardian, Mother Jones, and the Clarion-Ledger.

To paraphrase Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, I wonder if our constitution is the same one they are using.

Can I be plain? Water is life.

The Fremen of Arrakis knew it in Dune.

Water that we pay for on the town, city, state level should be clean. By clean, I mean not harmful to the bodies of the people who live in the town, city, state. Lead poisoning is no joke and can kill or impact a person for life.

The initial suit was because the federal monies for the state for remediation of the water problem went to the white communities, rather than Jackson.

It is Flint, Michigan all over again.

But it is the judgement that clean water is not a constitutional right because it isn’t explicitly stated in the document. Neither is abortion but the courts have LOTS to say about that!

It says life, right there.

A side note to the entire mess is that the judges felt that the legal fight was using the wrong avenue by using the word constitutional and should have sought redress by either suing through another path or, and this part kills me, “elective representatives who will better management the public-water system”.

My dudes, we have the best representation on a town, city, state, and federal level that money can buy.