Hi there, everybody. It's Fort Clark in New York. There are both glimmers of hope

and reasons for serious alarm today when it comes to assessing the health of our democracy. Every

authoritarian escalation by Donald Trump and his cabinet is being met with an equal and opposite reaction from the American people.

Consider the news breaking last night that the Justice Department failed to secure an indictment against the six Democratic lawmakers who released a video simply reminding the men and women of the military that every one of them swore an oath to the Constitution

and are thus duty-bound to refuse any illegal orders.

It's a message that in normal times would not be newsworthy, would not be controversial,

frankly, wouldn't even need to be said.

Our colleague Carol Lennox is reporting that prosecutors tried to charge the six with seditious conspiracy.

That is a felony,

and it carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. That is the same charge brought against the most violent and most organized insurrectionists behind the Capitol, behind the attack on the U.S.

Capitol on January 6th. And given that Donald Trump accused them of, quote, seditious behavior punishable by death,

this case was an attempt to turn the justice system into a tool for Donald Trump's vendettas.

But a grand jury stood in the way of all that.

New York Times puts it like this, quote,

it was remarkable that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, led by Janine Piro, a long-time

ally of Trumps, 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 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 Trump's bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.

Here's what two of those six lawmakers, Senators, Senators Alyssa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, had to say about the failed attempt to

indict them at a press conference earlier today.

Our democracy has been around for 250 years, but it is not guaranteed.

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