If American de-emphasized its presence there it would leave room for smaller players, such asAlaskaAirlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways and Spirit, to take up new routes.
So far as I can tell, AlaskaAirlines was not objecting to deregulation itself, so implicitly it wanted to treat the EPP as severable from deregulation, but it wantred to treat the legislative veto as inseparable from the rest of the EPP.