It’s bad enough that we have courts instead of elected lawmakers deciding matters such as levels of spending on public schools and treatment of residents of homeless shelters here in New York City. Now the Jets want a federal judge, Harold Baer Jr., to tilt the scales in their favor in their battle to gain rights to build a stadium on a Long Island Rail Road yard on the West Side of Manhattan.

The Jets haven’t been getting their way in Albany or with the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which controls the rail yard. So they’ve run into court in a last-ditch effort to bypass the competitive bidding process that the MTA is staging. It’s as if the Jets football team, the day before a playoff game with their arch-rival New England Patriots, decided that instead of actually playing the football game, they’d prefer to file a lawsuit accusing the Patriots of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act because they are the only NFL team in New England.

If that sounds exaggerated, cast your peepers over the lawsuit in which the Jets accuse Cablevision, the owner of Madison Square Garden and a rival bidder for the West Side site, of a monopoly over the market for – get this – “enclosed spectator facilities for large-scale events and suites in Manhattan.” This makes a mockery of anti-trust law. It’s like saying that Macy’s holds an illegal monopoly on department stores sponsoring Thanksgiving Day Parades and located at Herald Square. Well, yes, but there’s a Nordstrom in White Plains and at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island, and several others in New Jersey. And there are several Bed Bath and Beyond stores in Manhattan, and Century 21, and dozens of other stores of all sizes that, like Macy’s, sell apparel and jewelry and housewares and makeup. It’s not a monopoly in any meaningful economic sense.

The market that Madison Square Garden is competing in for antitrust purposes is the entertainment market for the entire New York metropolitan region. That includes Continental Arena in Newark, N.J., the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and Shea Stadium in Queens. It includes Carnegie Hall and the vacant lots and parks where circuses pitch their tents and bands play outdoor concerts. It includes private dining rooms in New York City restaurants, event spaces at Chelsea Piers and the Javits Center, and grand ballrooms at major New York hotels.

The Jets know perfectly well that Manhattan isn’t such an island unto itself, which is why they are trying to move their team here from New Jersey. It’s not as if they will have to find an entirely new fan base. They’ll be operating in essentially the same football team market. The Jets even admit as much in their complaint, which charges Cablevision with not only monopolizing the market for “enclosed spectator facilities for large-scale events and suites in Manhattan” but also of holding a “cable advertising monopoly” in “Long Island, the Bronx, Westchester and parts of Brooklyn.’ The lawsuit charges that the cable “monopoly” was “abused” to “prevent” the Jets from “reaching consumers.”

Well, cable contracts, like electricity or local phone lines, are supposed to be a natural monopoly because of the infrastructure investments involved in laying the cable. If the Jets or some other company wanted to bid for the cable contract in those areas when it was made available, they had every right to. But the idea that there is a monopoly on advertising in the New York market is just laughable. The Jets could make their case with broadcast television and radio advertising, with advertising on satellite television, with advertising on Time Warner Cable in Manhattan, with newspaper and magazine advertising, with advertising on subways and phone kiosks and on billboards. The idea that Cablevision, with its few local cable companies, could prevent the Jets from getting their message out is just absurd. The lawsuit quotes pro-Jet editorials in the Daily News and a column in Crain’s New York Business – a sign that the Jets are having no problem getting their message out, Cablevision’s supposed “monopoly” notwithstanding.

While complaining about the trouble they are having getting their own message out, the Jets are trying to stop Cablevision from getting its message out. The complaint charges Cablevision with “dissemination of deceptive and materially misleading advertising,” which it alleges are “deceptive business practices” under New York law. As evidence that the ads are deceptive, Cablevision cites Crain’s and Daily News articles arguing that the $600 million the city and state would put toward the stadium are capital expenditures to be financed though borrowing and don’t have anything to do with the operating budget that pays for schools, firefighters, and police.

But that is a debatable political point, and taking the other side of it – that the interest on the city’s debt is indeed paid from the operating budget and that reckless capital spending does in the end affect how much money is available to pay wages – hardly rises to a violation of state law. If Judge Baer agrees with the Jets that it does, the result would be a devastating chilling effect on political advertising that would trample the First Amendment and leave the public less well informed.

While the monopoly claims with respect to Madison Square Garden and cable advertising are ridiculous enough, and the accusation of deceptive advertising is a far reach, the most preposterous and arrogant claim of all is that by offering a competing bid for the West Side site Cablevision is engaging in “tortious interference with prospective business relations.” The lawsuit repeatedly refers to the Cablevision bid for the West Side site as a “sham.” Judge Baer, and the rest of New Yorkers with an interest in getting the best price for public assets, will want to know why if the Cablevision bid is such a “sham,” the Jets responded to it by announcing that they would increase their own bid for the site by about $200 million.

The Jets lawsuit claims the Cablevision bid was a sham in part because it “contradicted all the relevant zoning provisions governing the site.” And here they disclose the heart of the issue. The Jets want to make it a fineable offense in federal court – with punitive damages, yet – to even enter a bid for a site that differs from what a narrow segment of the city’s politicians and land-use bureaucrats have decided must be done with it. It doesn’t matter, they seem to say, that the bid would bring the taxpayers $200 million more for a saleable asset that might be worth nearly a billion were it not so thickly covered in political and legal incrustations. If the Jets don’t like this editorial, we wouldn’t be surprised if they haul us into federal court, too. After all, why have lawmakers or newspapers or open bidding processes when you can have lawsuits and judges?