00:00To all of our witnesses for joining us today, Spirit Airlines was once the nation's leading
00:06ultra-low-cost carrier and one of the strongest forces in the economy holding down ticket prices
00:12for consumers. It's now collapsed, and we cannot have a serious conversation about the demise of
00:17Spirit without talking about the obvious main culprit, the president's disastrous and illegal
00:23war in Iran. The Iran war has not only cost the lives of 13 American service members and thousands
00:29of Iranian civilians, including hundreds of children. It has cost American taxpayers more
00:35than $100 billion, and it's cost American consumers more than $60 billion in increased
00:41fuel costs alone, which averages to more than $470 per American household. It also caused the cost
00:50of jet fuel to double overnight, forcing Spirit to take on an extra $100 million in unexpected costs
00:57in just a couple of months. For an ultra-low-cost carrier like Spirit, which operates on thin
01:03margins to deliver the best value to customers, that was a corporate death sentence. As Spirit
01:10Airlines explained in its legal filings, the company went under because, quote,
01:14recent geopolitical events have resulted in a massive and sustained increase in fuel prices.
01:22But desperate to avoid any mention of Donald Trump's calamitous and historic blunder in Iran,
01:28which has split the Republican Party, my colleagues today have decided instead, somewhat comically,
01:35to blame overzealous antitrust enforcement. Americans are paying more today for groceries,
01:41gasoline, health care, housing, utilities, and, yes, airfare. At the same time, a vanishingly small
01:48number of companies is thriving. Consider the S&P 500, the stock market index of 500 publicly traded U.S.
01:55companies. Last month, the Financial Times published an analysis showing that just five of those 500
02:02companies, or 1 percent, accounted for 50 percent of the growth of the index. In the airline industry,
02:09the story of lopsided growth and economic concentration is the same. In 2000, the four largest carriers
02:16controlled roughly 60 percent of domestic traffic. Today, they control about 80 percent. One merger
02:23after another has consolidated the market power of the four major airlines, American, Delta, Southwest,
02:28and United. The result? Higher prices, lower wages, growing profits. Protecting competition requires
02:35regulators willing to say no to corporate consolidation. In 2023, the DOJ blocked JetBlue's
02:41attempted acquisition of Spirit. The result? Spirit continued to operate as an ultra-low-cost
02:47airline, offering consumers lower prices than competitor airlines and driving down the price of
02:52tickets on competitors. Economists called this, quote, the Spirit effect. When an ultra-low-cost airline
02:59like Spirit operates a route, the price of tickets on legacy carriers like American drops by an average of
03:0621 percent. As Judge Young, the Reagan-appointed judge who upheld the DOJ decision to block the
03:12Spirit-JetBlue merger, explained, quote, if JetBlue were permitted to gobble up Spirit, at least as
03:17proposed, it would eliminate one of the airline industry's few primary competitors that provides
03:23unique innovation and price discipline. It would further consolidate an oligopoly by immediately
03:29doubling JetBlue's stakeholder size in the industry. Worse yet, the merger would likely incentivize
03:34JetBlue further to abandon its roots as a maverick low-cost carrier. DOJ's actions in 2023 protected
03:41consumers from increased costs by focusing airlines to continue competing with Spirit and its ultra-low
03:48airfares until skyrocketing prices caused by Trump's disastrous war in Iran caused the airline to collapse.
03:56Yet our colleagues have taken the wrong lesson from this story, claiming we need
04:00less antitrust enforcement rather than more. This is alarming because under the Trump administration,
04:06antitrust enforcement has already been twisted and corrupted beyond recognition. Instead of being a tool
04:11to protect competition and innovation and to prevent companies from abusing their market power over
04:17consumers and workers, it's become just one more grift perpetrated by the President and his enablers for
04:23their own purposes of wealth maximization. Antitrust practitioners talk about a Trump transaction tax,
04:30the recognition that merger approval depends less on objective considerations and competition factors
04:37and more on a company's willingness to curry subjective political and financial favor with the President
04:43and the money-making operation being conducted at the White House. The warning signs of gangster state,
04:48crony capitalism are everywhere. In the last 12 months, this administration has cleared the Nextar-Tegna
04:54local broadcast merger, which will undermine the diversity of independently owned news operations
05:00in which a coalition of state AGs has already obtained a preliminary injunction to halt. It has
05:06settled the Live Nation Ticketmaster case with terms so favorable to Live Nation that the basic
05:12sweeping harms to artists, venues and millions of fans remain largely unaddressed. It cleared the paramount
05:18Skydance Warner Brothers discovery deal before career investigators had even completed their
05:23antitrust analysis. And every senior antitrust official who has cried foul over this pattern of
05:30concentration, including Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater at the Department of Justice and her
05:35Principal Deputy Attorney General Roger Alford, has been pushed out or fired for the offense of simply
05:41doing their jobs, the jobs they signed up to do and which the law requires of them. The consequences
05:47of this anti-antitrust corruption and pro-monopoly favoritism are simple. Corporations pass the Trump
05:55tax onto consumers. We pay higher prices for fewer choices, less competition, less innovation,
06:01more instability. Instead of concocting a cover story for the president, which blames Biden for the
06:10disastrous consequences of the Trump tariff and the Trump war in Iran, we should be doing serious oversight of
06:16an anti-antitrust enforcement system that has been thoroughly smashed up in this administration.
06:22Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back.
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06:33Follow the One India and never miss an update.
06:36So, let's see.
06:36Let's do it.
