Airfare Savings Grounded by Biden Administration

• Shortly after JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines announced a merger, they were sued by the Justice Department, six states, and the District of Columbia to stop the merger, which would ultimately mean lower fares for more Americans.
• Why sue to stop these airlines from combining? It certainly can’t be because of size, since the Biden administration is not trying to break up the much larger four main domestic carriers. American Airlines has 17.5% of the market, Delta Air Lines 17.3%, Southwest Airlines 16.9% and United Airlines 15.6%. JetBlue and Spirit combined would be only 10.4%.
• So instead of blaming size, the Justice Department claims the merger would harm consumers by $1 billion annually in the form of higher fares. But that argument is fundamentally flawed. If the merger did increase prices to consumers on net balance, it would completely undermine the business model of both JetBlue and Spirit.
• But the Justice Department and the state attorneys general suing to block the merger don’t seem to understand this, or the airline industry at all. In the name of protecting consumers, they would deprive them of cheaper airfares.

Schedule an Interview: EJ Antoni

Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Showdown Over Abortion Pill Access

• The Supreme Court on Wednesday took up a high-stakes legal battle that could lead to a definitive decision on whether the drug most commonly used for medication abortions will continue to be easily available, including by mail. This will be the Supreme Court’s most significant social issue case of the term.
• It’s important to remember the Court is addressing the Food and Drug Administration’s 2016 and 2021 decisions to drop its safety rules—not its original 2001 approval of Mifeprex.
• That emergency authority required the FDA to classify pregnancy as a serious or life-threatening illness to fast-track it to market.
• Then, using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse, the Biden administration subsequently loosened regulations for the distribution of the drug, increasing the likelihood of serious and life-threatening complications without an arguable justification.
• An alliance of pro-life doctors that have treated post-abortive women have sued to restore critical safeguards to protect women from a drug known to have a significantly higher complication rate than even surgical abortions.
• The two cases together are an opportunity for the court to continue to remind the Biden administration that agencies are bound to follow the law.
• For the FDA, the health and safety of women and their unborn children should be priority #1. 

Schedule an Interview: Sarah Parshall Perry and Thomas Jipping

The True Antidote to the Rot in America’s Universities

• American higher education is reeling from a litany of well-deserved scandals, most recently from the congressional hearing on antisemitism last week, which pulled back the curtain to reveal the world’s oldest hatred cloaked in the language of “diversity” and “inclusion.”
• The Marxist ideology pitting the “oppressed” against “oppressors” has ravaged higher education, discarding the wisdom of the ancients in a destructive pursuit of intersectional one-upmanship that is poison not just to the pursuit of truth but to the foundations of the social order and prosperity we take for granted.
• The antidote, however, is not a wholesale rejection of higher education but a return to the animating force that gives higher education its value—the artes liberales, or “liberal arts” education. Not liberal in the sense of the Left or the Right, but in the sense of equipping a person with the skills to enjoy and maintain freedom.
• While this kind of education may not be for everyone, it represents a good in itself, and America would be wise to preserve it amid the reckoning in higher education to come.

Schedule an Interview: Tyler O’Neil