[Editor’s note: This newsletter was delayed by a technical malfunction at Substack. We appreciate your understanding.]

Who would’ve thought America’s greatest weapon against Donald Trump’s authoritarian campaign of legal revenge against enemies would turn out to be grand juries? This week, yet another grand jury refused to give federal prosecutors indictments Trump wanted against yet another set of political foes: the six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video last fall reminding spooks and troops they had an obligation not to obey unlawful orders. Here’s the New York Times:

It was remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington . . . authorized prosecutors to go into a grand jury and ask for an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies.

But it was even more remarkable that a group of ordinary citizens sitting on the grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.

Ordinary citizens: What can’t they do? Happy Wednesday.

Public Sentiment Isn’t Everything

by William Kristol

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” In yesterday’s newsletter I quoted this famous (if perhaps apocryphal) remark by Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a French politician in the early days of the Revolution of 1848. I was commenting on a poll showing the public’s alarm about the possibility of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security interfering in this year’s elections. And I was struck by the relative silence of congressional Democratic leaders on that issue—even though they’re in the midst of a fight this week over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer emphasized again how much he hopes to work things out with Republicans: “There’s no reason we can’t get this [a deal with Republicans] done by Thursday.” And he didn’t rule out supporting a short-term DHS spending bill to buy more time for negotiations with the Trump administration.

Schumer and some of his colleagues remain strikingly unwilling to go on offense. Why not aggressively make the case for no new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol