If you ever wanted a master class in how Washington actually works, forget the textbooks. Just watch Elizabeth Warren spend years crusading to destroy a budget airline, succeed, and then hold a press conference demanding to know why there aren’t any budget airlines anymore. That’s not satire. That’s Thursday.

This is like setting your neighbor’s house on fire and then showing up at the HOA meeting to complain about property values. Except the neighbor is Spirit Airlines, the HOA is the United States Senate, and the arsonist has a campaign website.

Here’s what happened. Spirit Airlines — love ’em or hate ’em, and most of us hated their seats — was the budget option. The airline that let working families fly across the country for less than a decent pair of sneakers. They weren’t fancy. The legroom was a suggestion. But they were cheap, and cheap matters when you’re a family of four trying to visit Grandma in Florida without taking out a second mortgage.

Warren and her regulatory allies went after Spirit like it personally insulted their ancestors. They blocked Spirit’s merger with JetBlue — a deal that would have kept the airline alive and competitive. The DOJ, cheered on by progressive regulators who think “consumer protection” means “making sure consumers have fewer choices,” killed the deal. Without the merger, Spirit couldn’t survive. They filed for bankruptcy. The planes stopped flying. The jobs evaporated.

And now — NOW — Senator Warren is out here wringing her hands about how Americans don’t have enough affordable flight options. She’s publicly lamenting the “lack of competition” in the airline industry. She’s pointing fingers at the big carriers for jacking up prices.

You cannot make this up. We’ve tried. Reality keeps beating us to the punch.

This is the Warren playbook, and honestly, it’s the entire progressive playbook. Step one: identify a business that isn’t perfect. Step two: regulate it into a coffin. Step three: stand on the coffin and give a speech about how someone should really do something about all these coffins. Step four: fundraise off the speech.

Spirit Airlines served 30 million passengers a year. Thirty million. Those weren’t hedge fund managers flying to Davos. Those were regular Americans — the ones Warren claims to fight for between wine cave fundraisers — who needed to get from Point A to Point B without emptying their savings account. Now those 30 million people get to choose between Delta’s “basic economy” fare that costs more than Spirit’s best seat and… well, that’s it. That’s the list.

But here’s the part that really makes your blood pressure spike. Warren isn’t stupid. She knows exactly what happened. She knows her crusade killed the merger. She knows the merger was Spirit’s lifeline. She knows that without it, the airline was dead. She did the math. She just doesn’t care, because the political calculation works differently than the arithmetic.

See, in Warren’s world, killing Spirit Airlines was a “win” at the time. Big headlines. “Senator Fights Corporate Consolidation.” Press releases. Applause from the base. The fact that it would eventually mean fewer options and higher prices for the very people she claims to champion? That’s a problem for Future Elizabeth. And Future Elizabeth’s solution is — you guessed it — more regulation.

It’s a perpetual motion machine of government failure. Break the thing. Blame the breakage on capitalism. Propose more government to fix what government broke. Repeat until the economy looks like a DMV.

We’ve seen this movie before. They did it with energy. They did it with healthcare. They did it with housing. Kill the affordable option in the name of “protecting” people, then act shocked — SHOCKED — when nothing affordable is left. It’s not a bug in the progressive operating system. It’s the entire program.

The rest of us are just stuck paying the baggage fees.

So the next time Elizabeth Warren steps up to a microphone to tell you she’s fighting for working families, just remember: she’s the reason those working families can’t afford to fly anymore. She built the fire, lit the match, watched it burn, and now she wants you to thank her for calling the fire department.

Don’t. Thank. Her.