Even though Gorsuch refuses to say it, Lemon is effectively overruled. The Supreme Court has ordered lower courts to stop using it as the standard for deciding Establishment Clause cases. If you read the dissent by Sotomayor, had the Court followed Lemon and subsequent cases based on Lemon, this would have been a slam-dunk for the Bremerton School District. The rules have changed, and the nation should be grateful that the Supreme Court has put aside official hostility to religion and replaced it with a policy of neutrality.

The same points keep getting made in the debate on abortion. Here are the many reasons the usual points in favor of abortion are wrong. //

Abortion is a deeply divisive issue, and about half of Americans consider themselves pro-life and half call themselves pro-choice. Overturning Roe will not end abortion rights but return the issue to the states, allowing for a more democratic process — the debate will continue, but the truth remains the same.

Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.

Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term political advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.

The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate policymaking in the Biden administration.

The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular.

Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate Cabinet nonperformance.

Why? The left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense.

So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe was as shameful as its decision in Dred Scott — and for the same reason. //

The end of Roe v. Wade is perhaps the greatest political and cultural event in a generation. It will change American politics forever, and — what’s more important — it will save the lives of countless unborn children. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs is a great victory for the U.S. Constitution, for the American people, and for justice and truth and the common good.

It is also a turning point. We should now expect Democrats and the left to call more explicitly for violence, initially against places like crisis pregnancy centers and Catholic churches, as we have already seen, and eventually against ordinary people who disagree with them. We should expect not just calls for physical attacks against the justices in the Dobbs majority, but, as we have also already seen, attempts to carry out such attacks.

This violence will likely be accompanied by rhetoric that more explicitly posits abortion not just as a positive good — “shout your abortion” — but a necessary one for women to enjoy their full rights as citizens under the Constitution. The argument, already gaining steam in public discourse, is that without a constitutional right to kill the unborn, women are relegated to a kind of second-class status, stripped of their full humanity. This rhetoric will be used in part as a justification for violence, but it also reflects the actual views of Democrats and the left on abortion. //

Southern Democrats believed the denial of all rights to black people — and indeed the denial of their personhood — was integral to what they understood to be their constitutionally protected rights, without which they would cease to be citizens with equal rights as their northern counterparts.

The exact same thing can be said of today’s pro-abortion Democrats. They believe that the denial of all rights to the unborn is integral to what they understand to be women’s constitutionally protected rights, without which they will cease to be citizens with equal rights as their male counterparts. If women are not allowed to kill their unborn babies, they will be stripped of their full humanity, just as stripping slavery from southern whites meant, to them, stripping full humanity from white people.

The Dobbs decision and the end of Roe have exposed the Democrat view of the Constitution for what it is: not, as Frederick Douglass called it, “a glorious liberty document,” but a slave Constitution that relies for its operation on the total subjugation, indeed the extermination, of an entire class of people whose very humanity must be denied for the rights of women to be vindicated.

We should rejoice in the end of Roe, but we should also be realistic about what lies ahead. It took a civil war and three constitutional amendments to correct the Supreme Court’s error in Dred Scott. This time it took 60 million unborn dead before the Supreme Court corrected the error of Roe.

In the coming days and weeks, expect Democrats to sound the same notes of secession their forebears sounded. A constitutional order that vindicates the rights of the unborn is not a constitutional order they want to be a part of. We will hear the same arguments we heard in the 1850s and 60s, but instead of objecting to the emancipation of black Americans they will object to the emancipation of the unborn. Understand what this means. The last time Democrats openly made these kind of arguments, war soon followed.

2021 INDIES Winner
Bronze, Ecology & Environment (Adult Nonfiction)

DEAD SERIOUS
WILD HOPE AMID THE SIXTH EXTINCTION
Eli J. Knapp
Torrey House Press (Sep 21, 2021)

Clever prose and gifted storytelling enliven Eli J. Knapp’s Dead Serious, a weighty book about how species are being steamrolled toward extinction that nonetheless argues that a better future is possible.

Knapp, a self-branded “nature snoop” who always has his binoculars on hand, organizes his stories around the eighteen extinction factors outlined in an influential 1983 essay by Michael Soulé. His diverting descriptions of flora and fauna lead into captivating lessons about biological principles, all of which are embellished with humor and personal anecdotes. A dramatic account of seeking scenic beauty, and ending up camping near the hibernation site of timber rattlesnakes, is used to discuss rarity and species’ habitats, for example.

1. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is Public.
   There is no private message or disappearing photo that can’t be made public. Screenshots, using one device to take a photo of another device, and a quick “copy and paste” are a few of the ways that images and words shared electronically can be saved and shared by the recipient to an unintended recipient. //

2. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is Forever.
   Similar but different to the “digital is public” truth, digital is forever. Only a few short decades ago, when a note was passed between students in school or a photograph shared, it could be torn up into tiny pieces, doused with water, and thrown in the trash, even burned or put through a shredder. It would take a CIA-level forensics lab to even attempt to reassemble the message if there were any physical paper or part of the photograph remaining. Kids could truly destroy something they wrote or a photo of themselves.

All the same ways of saving things that were mentioned above apply here. That not only means that words and images can be shared but also that they can be stored. Forever. It’s not entirely unheard of for a business or educational institute to learn more about an individual through social media or an Internet search. Preteens and teens struggle with the idea of long-term consequences by the very nature of their maturity. Have your kids ask themselves, before posting: “What would I think about it if an adult I admired posted or shared the same thing? Would it be bad?” //

3. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is Human.
   It is approximately one billion times easier to say something mean across cyberspace than to someone’s face. Looking someone in the eye is powerful. Extreme emotions are easier to express when you don’t have to look the person in the eye and deal with the consequences. Cyberbullying is outrageously common, especially for young girls. For example, it may be hard to physically get up and move everyone at a lunch table, leaving one person to eat alone, but it takes less than a second to delete someone from a group chat or post a nasty comment on someone’s Instagram post. //

4. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is a Security Risk.
   Full names. Emails. Phone numbers. Addresses. Birth dates. The amount of data systems and strangers can get from profiles is disturbing. The same is true for using public wifi and clicking on links from unknown senders. Hackers don’t limit their attacks to adults, and if they can get a child’s data, they can make their life miserable as they grow up and begin interacting as an adult.

Referencing the “digital is public” point, have family ground rules for what is shared in a profile, especially those that are public on platforms or in systems by default. Read the fine print to know what you can hide from strangers when you are entering personal information. Talk about how to create unique passwords, where to store those passwords, and how never to click on a link sent by someone you don’t know. Have expectations for what kind of apps you use to transfer money, and make sure that kids know to never share things like their social security number. //

5. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is Powerful.
   Words, images, and videos all shape us. Studies show how viewing porn can be addictive and alter brain chemistry, and that is a massive problem in our world today. However, consider how the kind of content your kids consume shapes their behavior in other ways, as well. Most kids (and adults!) will say that media doesn’t shape us, but it’s difficult not to reflect on what we consume or not become numb to things that should bother us.

After 49 years of legal arguments, protests and political battles over the composition of the Supreme Court, the court has finally overturned Roe v. Wade.

No matter how you feel about abortion, this should be welcomed as a healthy development for American democracy and for the rule of written law made by the people’s representatives. Roe was a legal mistake that played a large role in driving our national politics crazy. Now the democratic process gets to decide what happens to abortion. //

The Supreme Court’s job is to read the law, not write it. Nothing in the Constitution mentions abortion even indirectly, and nobody before the 1970s thought the Constitution made abortion legal. At the time, even pro-abortion legal scholars thought Roe was shoddy. Its trimester framework reads more like a piece of legislation than like judicial reasoning, yet it foreclosed the democratic process from the kinds of compromises and changes over time that usually go into popularly enacted laws. //

The undemocratic nature of Roe produced a backlash that left the pro-life movement in politics much stronger than it had been in 1973. It revolutionized how political conservatives thought about constitutional law. It mobilized opposing factions in national elections, polarized along religious and cultural lines. It turned Supreme Court nominations into a circus. It occasionally triggered violence.

thidwick markvol
3 years ago edited
" the Bill of Rights was enacted primarily to entice the following territories to join the Union. In other words, Of Course the eighth is incorporated!"
Not actually. Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights was not considered to apply to state action. The Bill of Rights was in fact demanded by most of the states for agreeing to the Constitution as a limit on federal power, because while they recognized the need for a more vigorous and cohesive central government than under the Articles of Confederation, they also wanted to make sure the federal government would be constrained in various critical ways - those they could then enumerate (the first 8) and those they could not just yet (9 and 10). The Fourteenth Amendment imposed equal protection and due process limits on the states. After a few decades, the courts began interpreting the right to due process under the Fourtheenth Amendment as including various parts of the Bill of Rights. That is what 'incorporation' means in this context. Generally, states have not recognized that an amendment applies to them until the federal courts say so. Often they have parallel provisions in their constitutions, so it did not come up all that often. My recollection is that 'excessive fines' had been incorporated, but in the contexts of direct criminal penalties and punitive damages, not asset forfeiture.

But in looking through the Bill of Rights to make this reply, I noticed something I have not heard discussed before. Only the First Amendment says "Congress shall not..." The rest just say the rights of the people as to various things (be armed, not house soldiers, have jury trials for amounts over $20, etc.) shall not be infringed. It seems to me the difference reflects that only the First may have been intended to apply only to the federal government, allowing the states to have their established religions (as several did at the time), or make their own provisions as to press and speech. In any case, Marbury v. Madison (which said it was the courts' job to declare whether an Act was constitutional) was not issued until 1803, a generation after the Bill of Rights was ratified, and the legal establishment of the time may have simply forgotten that only the First was so limited to Congress's acts, and so when issues about state action arose, everyone just accepted that the Bill of Rights did not apply to them. This paragraph is largely speculative.

One of the evils of the criminal justice system that we at RedState have editorialized against over the years is civil asset forfeiture. This Orwellian process involves law enforcement confiscating property they allege to be the product of a crime without the inconvenience of either specifying the crime, charging a criminal, or even showing that a crime happened. This is from Heritage Foundation’s Civil Asset Forfeiture: 7 Things You Should Know:

https://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/03/civil-asset-forfeiture-7-things-you-should-know

https://dailycaller.com/2015/01/30/the-7-most-egregious-examples-of-civil-asset-forfeiture/

//

A trial court judge ordered the Land Rover returned as it was clearly bought with proceeds from a life insurance policy and it was excessive. The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that that silly old Eighth Amendment had never been incorporated, that is, made applicable to the states and because of that, the Indiana cops could do as they damned well pleased.

At the Supreme Court arguments, it was pretty clear that Indiana was on very unsteady ground with five justices very skeptical about the state’s arguments. No one knew just how skeptical the Supreme Court was until earlier this morning:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that states may not impose excessive fines, extending a bedrock constitutional protection but potentially jeopardizing asset-forfeiture programs that help fund police operations with property seized from criminal suspects. //

The court also held that the Eighth Amendment did, indeed, apply to the states. This is the decision.

Mice are breeding machines. They have a gestating period of 19 to 21 days. A female mouse gets pregnant about 5 to 10 times each year and can give birth to a litter of 3 to 14 pups. On average, the litter size ranges from 6 to 8 pups. On average, you are looking at least 32 to 56 pups each year from one female mouse.

The mice reproduce each year, and the mother can mate immediately after giving birth. So you could be looking at a new litter within 25 days. To make matters even more complicated, the female baby mouse is capable of reproduction at 6 weeks. So, they can start producing pups of their own and have about 10 litters of their own per year.

In a theoretical situation, two mice that sneak into your home could give birth to 60 in a year. Of these new mice, about 21 to 30 are female mice capable of having their babies within a month, which can theoretically lead to 5,082 mice in just one year. One mathematician calculated it to be 5 million mice per year, that is if it were a perfect world for mice. //

The average lifespan of a mouse is about 12 months in the outdoors. But when they take refuge in your house, they can live up to 2 or even 3 years.

The GOP members found that Pelosi repeatedly failed to implement necessary improvements to the Capitol’s security system. //

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi shoulders much of the blame for the security breakdown at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a preliminary report from Republican investigators Reps. Jim Banks and Rodney Davis determined.

The Capitol Police (USCP) were half-staffed on Jan. 6, Pelosi’s House Sergeant at Arms denied multiple requests for National Guard assistance from the Pentagon and the USCP Chief in the days leading up to Jan. 6, officers were poorly equipped and had insufficient riot shields and helmets, and they were never trained to handle a riot even after the riots of 2020, the investigation shows, according to Banks.

What the court ruled was that violating the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional violation that will get you into court with a “§1983” claim, but the Miranda warning is not the Fifth Amendment. Furthermore, two separate trial judges admitted Tekoh’s voluntary statement into evidence knowing there was no Miranda warning. That, right there, should tell you that this case is really about expanding the scope of §1983 for litigation and has nothing to do with the Fifth Amendment.

Miranda rests on a pragmatic judgment about what is needed to stop the violation at trial of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. That prophylactic purpose is served by the suppression at trial of statements obtained in violation of Miranda and by the application of that decision in other recognized contexts. Allowingthe victim of a Miranda violation to sue a police officer for damages under §1983 would have little additional deterrent value, and permitting such claims would cause many problems.

So the courts reduced it to simplicity itself: Miranda became only required in situations of “custodial interrogation”. That meant the suspect had to PHYSICALLY be in custody when the interrogation occurred for the courts to feel the overwhelming presence of the state was inherently coercive. There could still be questions involved regarding whether or not a person was considered physically in custody, and to a great extent they relied on ‘reasonable man’…. i.e. would a reasonable man observing the circumstance objectively think the suspect was in custody? If not, police were free to ask anything they wanted-to. Spontaneous statements were also admissible.

Clearly ‘custody’ obtained if the officer said the magic words, “You’re under arrest”. It would also obtain if the officer physically restrained the person before asking questions, and it may even obtain if the person was in a police station when being questioned. For this reason, any time I questioned someone at the police station, I had them sign a document that said they were in the police station of their own volition and were free to leave at any time and say nothing to me at all. It also said if that situation changed, they would be further advised of their rights at the time it did. This is a common practice in police investigations and is known as a Behelor admonishment. //

The idea that police can be sued for failing to Mirandize when there is no requirement they do so is ridiculous. If you don’t want to have police be able to do their jobs… just defund them. We’ve all seen where that leads.

“We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” Thomas wrote. “That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.” //

In his concurring opinion, Alito slammed dissenting Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor for bringing up irrelevant statistics to try and justify restricting Americans’ consitutional rights.

“Why, for example, does the dissent think it is relevant to recount the mass shootings that have
occurred in recent years?” Alito asked. “Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities? Will a person bent on carrying out a mass shooting be stopped if he knows that it is illegal to carry a handgun outside the home?”

Alito also questioned how the dissenting justices “account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo?”

“The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator,” he noted. //

Alito also noted in his concurring opinion that “The police cannot disarm every person who acquires a gun for use in criminal activity; nor can they provide bodyguard protection for the State’s nearly 20 million residents or the 8.8 million people who live in New York City.”

And since “ordinary citizens frequently use firearms to protect themselves from criminal attack,” they shouldn’t be stopped from carrying a gun for self defense in crime-ridden cities in states such as New York.

“Some of these people reasonably believe that unless they can brandish or, if necessary, use a handgun in the case of attack, they may be murdered, raped, or suffer some other serious injury,” Alito noted. “Today, unfortunately, many Americans have good reason to fear that they will be victimized if they are unable to protect themselves. And today, no less than in 1791, the Second Amendment guarantees their right to do so.”

The AMH Rabbi Erica and Mark Gerson L’Chaim Prize Initiative for Outstanding Christian Medical Missionary Service.

Thanks to the generous support of our Co-Founders, Rabbi Erica and Mark Gerson, AMH has established the Gerson-L’Chaim (“To Life”) Initiative. This initiative was launched in 2016 with our initial Rabbi Erica and Mark Gerson L’Chaim Prize for Outstanding Christian Medical Missionary Service. The annual L’Chaim Prize of $500,000 is the world’s largest annual award dedicated to direct patient care; the recipient is selected by a panel of leaders in African clinical medicine. The Initiative includes the L’Chaim Prize, an annual $500,000 award given to the winner’s institution to support transformational medical projects. AMH’s Mission Hospital Teaching Network is also a component of the L’Chaim Initiative. The MHTN brings together like-minded institutions committed to significantly expanding their training capacity. AMH’s MHTN includes signature 10-year, $2.5 million grants to hospitals in Kibuye and Malawi to enhance sustainability and expand medical educational programs.

The White House is refusing to share details about its coordinated efforts to engage in a federal takeover of election administration. //

When President Biden ordered all 600 federal agencies to “expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process” on March 7, 2021, Republican politicians, Constitutional scholars, and election integrity specialists began to worry exactly what was up his sleeve.

They had good reason. The 2020 election had suffered from widespread and coordinated efforts by Democrat activists and donors to run “Get Out The Vote” operations from inside state and local government election offices, predominantly in the Democrat-leaning areas of swing states. Independent researchers have shown the effect of this takeover of government election offices was extremely partisan and favored Democrats overwhelmingly. //

As with previous efforts to destabilize elections, the chaos and confusion that would occur are part of the plan. The Executive Order copied much of a white paper put out by left-wing dark money group Demos, which advocates for left-wing changes to the country and which brags on its website that it moves “bold progressive ideas from cutting-edge concept to practical reality.” Not coincidentally, Biden put former Demos President K. Sabeel Rahman and former Demos Legal Strategies Director Chiraag Bains in key White House posts to oversee election-related initiatives. //

One of the concerns shared by the members was that Biden was directing agencies to work with third-party organizations. Nobody knows which third-party organizations have been approved by Rice for her political efforts, nor which are being used. They also asked how much money is being spent on the effort, which statutory authorities justify the election activities, and what steps are being taken to avoid Hatch Act violations. They received no response. //

It is unclear why Biden and his political appointees are being so secretive about the work that went into their plan to engage in a federal takeover of election administration.

Whatever the case, Americans have a right to know whether these bureaucracies that are meddling in elections have experts in for each state’s election laws, what type of training is going on to ensure that state laws are being followed, whether they are allowing inspections and oversight to ensure no illegal activity, how they are determining whether a third-party group is genuinely non-partisan, whether they are allowing state investigators to approve money, and how much is being spent on this federal takeover of elections.

Sorry, but there is nothing routine about 240,000 illegal migrants crossing the border in a month. That’s a city the size of Buffalo or Toledo.

It’s an exponential increase since Joe Biden dismantled Trump-era border protections. Illegal crossings quadrupled in his first two months. And he has 29 months left.

His administration has become efficient at hustling illegal immigrants from the border and out to the rest of the country so as to avoid the bad optics of 3 million illegal border crossings in their first 16 months (to May).

Charter planes from airlines such as World Atlantic, iAero, Avelo and new entrants Omni and Canada’s GlobalX fly daily from border airports such as Harlingen and El Paso, Texas, or Yuma, Ariz., to a town near you.

Luke Rosiak at The Daily Wire has just compiled data on nearly three dozen charter planes believed to have been deployed to move illegal migrants in a conveyer-belt operation in the dead of night to small airports as far afield as California, Iowa, Tennessee, Ohio, Georgia, Florida and New York. //

I’ve watched illegal migrants get off these flights in White Plains and a significant number look to be in their late teens to early 20s. The youngest might be 16. Most are male — the cheap-labor demographic.

But even if you take the Biden administration’s word that they are all minors, then authorities are negligent about their welfare.

We have seen them picked up in buses that hurtle down Westchester highways at reckless speeds.

We have seen them dropped off after midnight at service areas off the New Jersey Turnpike, where no one checks the bona fides of the so-called sponsors who come to pick them up.

We have seen them dropped off at affordable-housing complexes in Yonkers and The Bronx, with no chaperones outside to ensure their safety.

The administration and agencies have stonewalled The Post’s efforts to report on this migrant-dispersal operation. They moved planes to the other side of the tarmac at White Plains to stop us photographing them. The charter buses from J&F Tours covered over their logos.

But it doesn’t take much to stop Biden’s butlers at NPR from reporting one of the biggest abuses of power in this country.

Editor’s note: In these exclusive excerpts from the book “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” out Tuesday, author Michael Pack asks the Supreme Court justice about the influence of his maternal grandfather. Thomas was 2 when his father left the family.

The new book is a successor to the 2020 documentary about Thomas with the same title, which Pack produced and directed. Pack wrote the book with Mark Paoletta, a former official in both the Bush and Trump administrations who played a key role in the Senate’s confirmation of Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991.

Michael Pack: In 1955, you moved to live with your grandparents in Savannah, Georgia. How and why did that happen? //

My grandfather said, “I will never tell you to do as I say. I will always tell you to do as I do.” Years went by and I thought about who would put that burden on themselves, because a kid sees all and a teenager sees and knows even more. And that’s the burden he put on himself.

I asked my brother when we were both in our 40s: “Did you ever think he was a hypocrite because of what he said, ‘Do as I do?’” My brother without hesitation said, “No.” Whatever mistakes he made, he admitted them, and he just said, “Follow me.”

He made us follow him. He wouldn’t let us play organized sports. He wouldn’t let us stray. He kept us close to him as though we were his apprentices in life, that we were adults in training. He was the one who was going to train us, so we were to follow him. Watch how he did it. “Watch how I live my life and you will learn.” //

On Saturdays, invariably, I was the one who went on the oil truck with him, and that was all day. When you rode with him, he was the professor and you were to be seen and not heard. You could not initiate a conversation unless you wanted to clarify an instruction he had given. You were constantly getting this one-way input. And you couldn’t get away from him because you always had to be around him.

This project is a lightweight authentication server that provides an opinionated, simplified LDAP interface for authentication. It integrates with many backends, from KeyCloak to Authelia to Nextcloud and more!

The goal is not to provide a full LDAP server; if you're interested in that, check out OpenLDAP. This server is a user management system that is:

• simple to setup (no messing around with slapd),
• simple to manage (friendly web UI),
• low resources,
• opinionated with basic defaults so you don't have to understand the subtleties of LDAP.

It mostly targets self-hosting servers, with open-source components like Nextcloud, Airsonic and so on that only support LDAP as a source of external authentication.

For more features (OAuth/OpenID support, reverse proxy, ...) you can install other components (KeyCloak, Authelia, ...) using this server as the source of truth for users, via LDAP.

The altimeter design problem goes back decades. "Fundamentally, the problem is a design issue with the aviation industry's radar altimeters," Dennis Roberson, who runs a technology consulting firm and is a research professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, told lawmakers during a House subcommittee hearing in February.

When altimeters were designed, "they had very low-power neighbors, i.e., satellites beaming their information to the earth from very distant orbits... This led the early designers of the altimeters to decide they really could ignore their assigned spectrum boundaries, and as a result they allow transmitted energy far outside their band into the receiver," Roberson explained.

The aviation industry's slowness in fixing altimeters may lead to the FCC cracking down on bad wireless receivers. In April, the FCC voted unanimously to launch an inquiry into poorly designed wireless devices that receive transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies.

The inquiry could result in new receiver regulations similar to the rules that already require wireless devices to transmit only in their licensed frequencies. "To avoid harmful interference, we typically have rules about how and when transmitters can operate," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said at the April meeting. "But wireless communications systems involve transmitters and receivers... so we need to rethink our approach to spectrum policy and move beyond just transmitters and consider receivers, too."