The Biden-engineered Spirit Airlines collapse
by Editorial Board · The Washington TimesOPINION:
It was supposed to protect passengers. At least, that was what the Biden administration said.
“Our department, the Department of Transportation, has generally not gotten involved in these merger cases, but that’s changing today,” Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN in March 2023 after the Justice Department filed a lawsuit to block a $3.8 billion JetBlue takeover of Spirit Airlines.
“It is so important to make sure that passengers have choices, that they have access to low fares, that they have access to competition,” he said.
Well, now they have access to one less airline.
On Saturday, less than a year after filing for bankruptcy a second time, the famously no-frills, low-cost Spirit Airlines announced that it was going out of business.
The news was announced about 2½ years after a federal judge sided with the Biden administration, ruling against the proposed JetBlue-Spirit merger on antitrust grounds.
JetBlue quickly deep-sixed the deal.
At the time, the political left was nothing short of gleeful. President Biden, in an X post in early 2024, called the judge’s decision “a victory for consumers everywhere who want lower prices and more choices.”
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Said Attorney General Merrick Garland: “The Justice Department proved in court that a merger between JetBlue and Spirit would have caused tens of millions of travelers to face higher fares and fewer choices.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, never one to remain silent when there is credit to be claimed, posted on X that she had “warned for months that a [JetBlue-Spirit Airlines] merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares.”
The administration, she said, had been “right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation. This is a Biden win for flyers!”
Only, it wasn’t. It was a resounding loss of consumer choice and freedom, and it directly led to the events of the weekend.
As Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News on Monday, “They were bleeding money. They were bleeding market share.”
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JetBlue’s acquisition of the airline “would have made JetBlue stronger,” Mr. Duffy said. “You would have had one stronger airline as opposed to one airline going out of business. And so the story was written years ago.”
Of course, the war in Iran and the resulting spike in fuel prices worsened Spirit’s financial situation, as they did for any other fuel-consuming company or person.
Still, the American airline landscape would look different today — better — if that merger had gone through. Flights would likely be cheaper than before the Spirit collapse, rather than the even higher sticker prices experts anticipate in the coming months. Some 17,000 people would still have jobs, and several thousand travelers would still have flights.
The Spirit Airlines collapse will go down in history as another one of Mr. Biden’s wins that just keep losing.
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