Federal Court Rules You Have NO Constitutional Right to Clean Water, Using the Case that Ended Roe

Did you know, there is no constitutional right to drink water that won’t poison you. That’s not a hot take, that’s a federal appeals court ruling handed down Friday, and Sophie Hurwitz at Mother Jones is one of the only people who noticed.Here’s what that means in practice. Your city can put lead in your water. Your city can find out about the lead. Your city can then tell you the water is fine. And when your kid comes back from the pediatrician with brain damage, you have no federal case. Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote that these deprivations, and I quote:“While grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.” Grievous but constitutional. Sounds like a rejected Latin motto.This is Jackson, Mississippi. In 2015 the state health department found elevated lead and sat on it for six months while people drank it. In 2020 the EPA found “persistent and concerning violations.” Nobody fixed it. What the city did issue was boil-water notices, and here’s the part that would be funny if it weren’t load-bearing. Boiling kills bacteria. But is also concentrates lead, because the water leaves and the lead stays. The official public health guidance was to reduce the poison like a pan sauce.A quarter of Jackson is children. Several kids of one of the plaintiffs have been diagnosed with lead poisoning, which causes permanent brain damage.Engelhardt’s suggested remedy for permanent brain damage is to sue in state court, petition your legislature, and: “Elect officials who will better manage the water system.” Vote harder. Turnout is the antidote. Get out there, kids, and if you can’t read the ballot, well, we know why.Now, how does a judge get to no right to clean water. You have to show a right is deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition. That is the test the Supreme Court invented in Dobbs to end abortion, and Engelhardt reaches for it six separate times. So the movement that spent fifty years building a machine to prove the framers never wrote down a right to an abortion has now handed every judge in America a machine that works on anything the framers never wrote down. And the framers never wrote down lead pipes. They were still bleeding people with leeches.The ruling binds Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Forty million people. The Sixth Circuit went the other way on Flint, which makes a split, which means the Supreme Court can pick it up and hand the rest of us the same deal. Same Court that wrote the test. These people want us living like it’s 1791 so badly they’re taking the shots away too. Give them a few more terms and we’ll be back on leeches for real, except the leeches will be a public-private partnership.And in case you assumed clean water was protected somewhere else, it isn’t. Nine states protect it on their own. Nine. There is no federal protection. There never was.Same day, Trump’s EPA moved to weaken the Clean Water Act further. So one branch ruled they can poison you and lie about it, and the other spent Friday making the poisoning easier. And this is the deal now. Every state for itself. Your right to an abortion, your right to vote, your right to stay in the country, and now your right to a glass of water depend entirely on which side of a state line you were standing on when you got thirsty. Forty-one states where the only thing between your tap and your kid is a city official’s word, and a court just ruled that word does not have to be true. Pack a canteen.Sourceshttps://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/drinking-water-mississippi-lawsuit/https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pdfhttps://www.epa.gov/wotus Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe