The senator is not even telling half the story.
The senator is not even telling half the story.
W hat fun it must be to play poisoner and physician.
In 2024, after the Biden administration successfully blocked a merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, Senator Elizabeth Warren was elated. “This,” she tweeted out excitedly, “is a Biden win for flyers!”
Last week, however, as Spirit prepared to close its doors, Warren struck a different note. “The Big Four airlines (American, Delta, Southwest, United),” she lamented, “control 75% of the U.S. market. Fewer choices = higher prices for you.”
Well, then.
Aware, perhaps, that her supposed “win for flyers!” has been seamlessly transmuted into “fewer choices,” Warren is now helping the police look for the real killer. “Spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war,” Warren wrote on Saturday, “was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline. FWIW, JetBlue merger failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal.”
Superficially, both of those statements are true. It is, indeed, the case that the “nail in the coffin” was “spiking fuel prices,” and that prices spiked because of “Trump’s war.” It is also the case that “a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan,” endorsed the government’s brief. But neither of those facts comes close to justifying the position that Warren took in 2023, or to letting her and the politics she espouses off the hook. As Warren herself notes, Spirit was in bad shape. It had been “twice-bankrupted,” it was heavily in debt, and both its fleet and its routes had considerably diminished in size. That phrase that Warren used — “nail in the coffin” — ineluctably implies that, by the time the fatal action occurred, there was already a corpse, and that it was inside a coffin that had been almost perfectly sealed. And so there was. Spirit, by April of this year, was such a mess that any noticeable disruption — be it a jump in costs, a strike, or even a period of terrible weather — was liable to drive it into the ground. Which is why, seeing this coming, the airline had tried earlier to merge with JetBlue. If Elizabeth Warren wishes, we can all point at Donald Trump and agree that his decision to invade Iran drove in the final nail. And then, having done that, we can ask about all the others.
How about that “judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan”? Was he to blame, too? Nah. Like many other antitrusters, Elizabeth Warren makes it sound as if the court in that case was simply enforcing a neutral law. But this is too clever by half. The JetBlue–Spirit case did not magically appear before Judge William Young, as might a request for an advisory opinion. It was brought. In its infinite wisdom, the Biden administration actively decided to block the merger, and, in consequence, Judge Young was asked to review the matter. Had the Biden administration not brought the case, there would have been no review and no injunction. As for the claim that the merger was “illegal”? Yes, the judge held as much, and, as is proper, all parties respected the decision. But one ought to remember that the statute at hand, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, is so broad and so shapeless as to be effectively meaningless as law, and that, in cases brought under it, the judiciary is inevitably guided by how the facts are presented by the executive. For more than a century now, this entire realm has resembled little more than a gussied-up game of Calvinball, with all three branches of government making up the details as they go along. The original sin in this instance was not committed by JetBlue or by Spirit or by Judge Young or by Donald Trump; it was committed by the Biden administration’s desire to micromanage an airline market that it clearly did not understand.
I do not know whether Spirit would have survived if it had merged with JetBlue, and I will not pretend otherwise. But neither does Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, or anyone else who was involved in preventing it from taking the actions that it believed were necessary to secure its future. That being so, my presumption is that if JetBlue and Spirit believed that they would have been better off together, they ought to have been permitted to proceed. There was never a strong case that their merging would have served to “substantially lessen competition” or, for that matter, that such a merger was likely to leave their employees, their passengers, or the broader industry worse off than if they went under. Spirit spent the last month of its life begging the federal government for billions of dollars, and, when that failed, it summarily shut down operations, leaving thousands of travelers stranded. If, as Elizabeth Warren claims, that represented “a Biden win for flyers!” then I’d truly love to see what a loss looks like.