A version of this essay first appeared in Crash Course, Salon’s free morning newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this, plus more of Salon’s bold journalism on how policies, movements and culture wars affect real people.
A week ago, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit against Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged that the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water, violating their right to bodily integrity and accurate information from the government. Kurt Engelhardt, a judge appointed by President Donald Trump, thumbed his nose at that reasoning, ruling “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing.” He added, “These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
A lot has happened in the past week, from assaults on voting rights to a lot of arguing about different maps to the president apparently offering $5,000 bribes to voters. But this ruling should get a lot more attention, especially Engelhardt’s bit about there being no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.”
Is that really where we’re at as a society? The government can let you be poisoned and lie about it, and you’re just supposed to suck it up? This issue is deeply related to the newly released trove of documents that indicate that New Yorkers were “misled” — essentially lied to — about air quality risks following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The 170,000 documents, released by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ahead of the tragedy’s 25th anniversary, detail how the public was repeatedly reassured that the air near the collapsed towers was safe. But that wasn’t the case, and those exposed are now at elevated risks of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, not to mention cancer.
“We were dying with every breath we took down there. What we learned is that the city knew it,” Lt. James Brosi, president of New York City’s Uniformed Fire Officers Association, told CNN. This is even more alarming in light of reporting this week from The Washington Post that “The number of 9/11 survivors who are receiving aid for cancer has roughly tripled over the last five years.”
Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
The ruins at Ground Zero were certainly a public health crisis. But according to Engelhardt, it doesn’t matter that the Environmental Protection Agency told New Yorkers not to worry and breathe it all in. This makes you wonder what the “protection” part of their agency is actually about, but it does make it more apparent why Mamdani’s opponents are attacking him over 9/11. For the easily distracted, it’s great deflection from their own failures to protect Americans.
The bottom line is this: It’s absurd that we are even having this discussion in 2026. Ideally, we should be debating whether internet access or education are human rights. I’m more on the fence about that than healthcare or free speech, which are undeniable human rights in my opinion. But arguing about a constitutional right to clean air and water — something as far down on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as it gets — is just bonkers.
This isn’t true everywhere. As Mother Jones reports, “in at least nine US states, and in more than a dozen other countries, clean drinking water is in fact a protected right. In countries including Uruguay and South Africa, a right to clean water is enshrined in their constitutions. New York’s constitution, as of a 2021 amendment, states that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” So too in Massachusetts, where “the right to clean air and water’ has been constitutionally protected since 1972.” Maybe that sucks for Mississippi, but let’s not overlook the institutional-racism aspect of this either. Again from Mother Jones: “Jackson is more than 80 percent Black and has a poverty rate that is more than double the national average.” It’s not hard to read between the lines here.
Engelhardt may be technically correct that there’s no explicit law on the books about bodily integrity, but he’s wrong in a much broader sense. If government doesn’t have a responsibility to provide safe access to air and water — and doesn’t even have to tell the truth about it — then what is even the point of the government in the first place? People in judicial positions, like Engelhardt, seem unaware that chipping away at the very foundations of functional society like this threatens to make it unable to function — and that people won’t tolerate being poisoned or lied to like this forever. The backlash could be severe.
Maybe it’s difficult for the government to tell the truth and enforce some basic standards of public health. The alternative, though, is to ensure its own destruction.
Read more
from Troy Farah
