Governor Chris Christie speaks at CPAC

A week prior to crushing Tesla, Chris Christie defends the free market at the Conservative Political Action Conference; you can't tell from this photo whether he had his fingers crossed.

((John O'Boyle/The Star-Ledger))

When you’re hot, you’re hot.

When you’re not, you’re Chris Christie.

Bridgegate was bad enough, but last week the governor managed a rare trick: He outraged everyone across the political spectrum.

The occasion was a move by his hand-picked members on the Motor Vehicle Commission to ban the sale of Tesla electric cars in New Jersey.

On the right, the National Review said that our governor "slapped free markets across the face."

In the middle, a headline in the California-based magazine Wired read, "New Jersey Bans Tesla to Ensure Buying a Car Will Always Suck."

And on the left, the Daily Kos accused Christie of being "in the pocket of the Koch Brothers and/or their Big Oil pals," adding, "Maybe Christie figured he’s on his way down the drain, so he might as well do one last solid for his puppet masters."

He's certainly circling the drain. But when it comes to the puppet masters, in this case they weren't from Big Oil. They were from the even bigger car dealers lobby, said Daniel O'Connor of the free-market Disruptive Competition Project in Washington.

"They have an average of 17 millionaires in every legislative district," O’Connor said. "It’s very difficult for Tesla to push back."

Over the years, the dealers lobby has managed to get franchise laws enacted in almost every state in the union. That means carmakers can’t sell directly to the public, as Tesla does. And that in turn adds about $20 billion in cost to consumers annually, he said, or about $1,500 per vehicle.

Tesla is hardly a major threat to the monopoly. The company sells only about 20,000 cars per year. That works out to about one per dealer nationwide, O’Connor said, and that would make it impossible to sell Teslas at a profit through franchises.

If other governors follow Christie’s lead, Tesla will be driven out of business, he said. But if Christie were really the free-market advocate he pretends to be, this would have been a great opportunity to prove it, O’Connor said.

"This should be a red meat kind of thing for Christie," he said. "He should say this law makes no sense and there’s no way we should enforce it."

Instead he tried to sneak the deal through when no one was looking. The agenda for the commission's Tuesday meeting simply announced "Approval of Item 1403-03 — Licensing Service Regulation." It didn't say anything about strangling Tesla in the crib, but a few alert members of the electric-vehicle community noticed the move anyway.

"There’s a lot of anger in the community that this was sort of a backroom deal," said Michael Thwaite of Warren, a member of the New Jersey Electric Auto Association.

Michael Thwaite with his Tesla and two other electric cars.

Thwaite has a Tesla among his personal fleet of electric vehicles. When he wanted to buy it four years ago, he simply went online and ordered it from Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., the same way you’d order an iPad from Apple.

Last year, Thwaite let me take the Tesla for a test drive. It was the fastest car I'd ever driven, so fast that, with the aid of a good radar detector, I could have made it to the Pennsylvania state line in perhaps 20 minutes.

That's where Tesla will be taking its business. Owner Elon Musk put out a statement Friday encouraging Jersey customers to visit his showroom in King of Prussia, Pa., after the company is booted out of New Jersey by the same governor who whines constantly about over-regulation chasing businesses out of the state.

What was Christie thinking?

He's been hiding from the press (check the Politickernj site for a clock of how long it's been since his last press conference; 67 as of Monday) ever since Bridgegate broke in January. All we have to go on is a statement from his spokesman, who argued that the governor had no choice but to enforce the franchise law currently on the books.

Nonsense. Governors in other states have refused to enforce similar laws. That forced dealers in New York and Massachusetts to sue to shut down Tesla. The suits were thrown out of court.

"Dealers cannot utilize the Franchised Dealer Act as a means to sue their competitors," the New York Supreme Court ruled. "An increase in business competition is insufficient to confer standing."

It is, however, sufficient to get the attention of the same New Jersey governor who the week before addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in an effort to revive his flagging prospects for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

"We need to talk about the fact that we’re for a free-market society that allows your effort and your ingenuity to determine your success, not the cold, hard hand of government determining winners and losers," Christie said.

Yes, we need to talk about that.

But with someone who actually believes it.

That rules out a certain governor who’s doing his best to commit political suicide.

ALSO: In case you're wondering just how much it costs to have the governor crush your competition, read this article about contributions to Christie's inaugural ball:

Looks like they got their money's worth.

AND THIS: At the very time the governor's running Tesla out of the state, a Senate committee is holding a hearing Monday on a bill encouraging the state to push for more charging stations. What will we need them for once Christie has pushed Tesla into Pennsylvania?

COMMENTS: No more clueless comments to the effect the governor had no choice but to enforce that law, please. As I noted, he could have told the dealers lobby to take Tesla to court, as other governors did. The suit would be promptly thrown out.

There are hundreds of statutes on the books the state does not enforce. Go to this site and you will find more than you can list. As I noted, a typical such law is the one stating that vehicles over 7,000 pounds gross vehicle weight are prohibited on the Parkway, but that is not enforced.

So spare us the amateur lawyering. It's boring.



UPDATE: Ex-lobbyist Christie urges Tesla to start buying his fellow politicians. That's my translation of this article on Politickernj concerning Christie's comments on the Tesla controversy at a recent town hall.

Christie tried to shift blame for the shutdown to the Legislature, but it was his appointees at the Motor Vehicle Commission who voted to shut down the free market in auto sales in New Jersey. To do so, they had to make the ludicrous argument they were doing so for "consumer protection."

In reality, the statute in question applied only to "franchisors." Tesla does not fit that category since it does not sell franchises. Christie could have told the car dealers that Tesla has every right under both the law and the constitution to display its vehicles in New Jersey. Instead this former lobbyist sold out to the lobby.

And as a former lobbyist, Christie knows perfectly well that the only way Tesla could get the statute changed is to buy even more politicians than the dealers' lobby does. What he was really saying amounts to a protection racket: "You want to operate in my state, Elon? Well then you gotta give my friends a little money."

By the way, if Christie had wanted that statute amended, all he had to do was ask. The Legislative Democrats would have had little choice but to comply. Otherwise they'd find themselves in the situation Christie's in right now - getting publicly outed as a stooge for the car dealers' lobby.

(Watch the industry flack try to pretend he's supporting the free market below:)