Democracy can’t thrive without protest - even the violent one I can’t erase from my mind | Opinion

A police officer’s fist to a female student’s face, an account detailed in a letter by University of Texas-Austin faculty condemning police actions on campus. Of all the disturbing things I’ve seen or read in recent days, that stuck with me most.

Maybe it’s the violent intimacy of the act. Maybe the power imbalance. Maybe because it illustrates better than anything else, we’ve lost our way.

Or, maybe because it underscores how fruitful and unnecessary the decisions by college presidents and armed agents of the state on campuses from New York to California have revealed themselves to be. They have been cruel in the extreme. While the police officer was punching that student, the nation was being treated to U.S. Supreme Court hearings that amounted to what could be narration of the effective end of the world’s oldest-standing democracy.

It sounds like hyperbole. But just think about what was just argued before the court. In a case that could determine if presidents and former presidents could essentially be immunized from criminal prosecution, a lawyer for Donald Trump was asked if a president would be immune after ordering the assassination of a political rival because of alleged corruption.

“It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act,” attorney D. John Sauer told the court.

It’s tempting to ignore his words, given that the court may rule against Trump. That would be unwise, knowing the court shouldn’t have taken this case if the adage “no man above the law” was a principle we held dear.

George Washington has long been praised for setting the stage for our democracy by refusing to hold onto power at any cost. It’s taken nearly two and a half centuries, but that question is back before us again, this time in the person of Trump, a man who has incited a violent insurrection attempt and has violated every political norm and exposed a cold, hard reality. Our vaunted system of checks and balances is only as good as the people we empower to uphold it.

That’s at the existential end of the spectrum. On the personal end, Idaho defended its near-total abortion ban before the Supreme Court on Wednesday by making it clear abortions shouldn’t be legal even if the pregnant woman is in so much distress, she may not only lose the baby, but an organ. The state argued a 40-year-old Ronald Reagan era law that determines how people are to be treated when they show up at a hospital’s emergency room doesn’t really apply to pregnant women if an abortion is what they need in an urgent situation.

It’s not a hypothetical. An increasing number of women have been facing such scenarios since Roe v. Wade was upended by the ultra-conservative Supreme Court, including in North Carolina.

Staff at Person Memorial Hospital in Roxboro, N.C. turned away a woman complaining of stomach pain, saying they couldn’t provide her with an ultrasound, according to The Associated Press. Neither did they tell her how risky it would be to leave before being stabilized. She gave birth in a car while trying to make it to a hospital 45 minutes away – her baby didn’t make it.

There are more such horror stories, including a woman who miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room after staff refused to check her in.

But I can’t get the image of a police officer’s fist to a female student’s face out of my mind because it came during peaceful protests. No matter if you agree with that student’s politics, you must know that protest, even the loud and obnoxious kind, is the bedrock of this democracy, and that this democracy can’t thrive without it. The heavy hand of the law coming down on her is not only a threat to her, but to us all.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.