In the recurring theater of American electoral politics, old words have a way of returning at inconvenient moments. Christina Bohannan, an Iowa law professor turned legislator making her third bid for Congress, finds herself confronting a 2021 statement in which she called her state's police-support law an 'overreaction' — words now resurrected by opponents in a district so evenly divided that 799 votes once separated victory from defeat. The episode reflects a broader tension in democratic life: how societies weigh the permanence of conviction against the evolution of political circumstance,