Democrats fingerprints are all over the Spirit Airlines crime scene

Regulators no longer have to worry that Spirit Airlines might upset the air-travel market by merging with the wrong competitor. The now-defunct airline made poor business decisions and had to cope with tough circumstances.But if its demise were an Agatha Christie mystery, the fingerprints of Joe Biden’s antitrust officials would be all over the crime scene. These zealots fought a proposed deal between JetBlue and Spirit, and congratulated themselves on a 2024 court victory that doomed Spirit to likely oblivion. This was wanton economic destruction masquerading as antitrust enforcement. Sen.Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who never met an antitrust action she didn’t like, exemplifies the perversity.After the Biden administration got a federal judge to put the kibosh on the JetBlue-Spirit deal in 2024, she celebrated: “This is a Biden win for flyers!”Last week, as Spirit teetered on the edge of the grave, she expressed dismay: “The Big Four airlines (American, Delta, Southwest, United) control 75% of the US market.

Fewer choices = higher prices for you.”Yes, it would be terrific to have a bigger, more serious challenger to the established players, wouldn’t it?If only there’d been a way to achieve such an outcome. The federal judge on the JetBlue-Spirit case conceded that “an expansion of all aspects of JetBlue’s business — including network, fleet and loyalty program — would allow for more vigorous competition with the Big Four, which carry most passengers in the country.”No matter: For Biden officials, antitrust enforcement was a scholastic exercise where the definition of monopoly had no connection to reality. If JetBlue had succeeded in gobbling up Spirit, that airline still would have been smaller than the Big Four.Worrying about JetBlue getting too big is like fretting that Thrifty — the fifth largest car-rental outlet in the United States after Enterprise, Hertz, Avis and Budget — is one relatively small acquisition away from es...