Today was my final day as a summer law clerk with the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.  Now that my U.S. Senate badge is turned in and I no longer in any way speak for the senator for whom I interned — the Honorable Mike Lee of Utah — the time has come for reflection.

We live in a deeply disturbed world.  Ethnic minority separatists in the Ukraine shoot civilian airliners out of the sky.  There are legitimate pogroms in Paris and rising Jew hatred in Berlin and Rome, as European Jews make Aliyah to Israel — a country under the constant bombardment of terrorist rocket fire — in hitherto unforeseen numbers.  There are ostensibly mainstream journalists on indisputably mainstream cable news network who attribute surviving the Holocaust to “white privilege.”  Practicing Christians are forced to abdicate their sincerely held doctrinal beliefs at the altar of secular humanist political correctness, as the “new tolerance” perniciously supplants sincerely held religious beliefs, entrepreneurship, and private property rights alike.  Hashtag diplomacy is all the rage, supplanting Reaganite “peace through strength” as the contemporary guiding light of Obama-era American international relations.

As it so happens, we live in a deeply disturbed world due in no small part to the unfathomable moral dilapidation of the modern-day Left.  These past few months have been particularly illuminating, then, in once again evincing to all of us conservative activists why it is that we fight:

•  We fight because the Left seeks to undermine our rule of law and our national sovereignty at the southern border, masquerading under the guise of being “pro-immigrant” or “pro-human rights” but with the ulterior motive of emancipating the nation from the outmoded constraints of cultural “Americanism” and inching toward the Left’s risibly quixotic but sincerely held utopia of global government.  We fight because the Left invokes “prosecutorial discretion” to justify a de facto implementation of the DREAM Act amnesty by executive fiat, notwithstanding the current crisis on the southern border their lawlessness and amnesty magnets directly helped foment.
• We fight because the Left could care less about the classically Madisonan constitutional framework — described in Federalist No. 45 — of a federal government of “few and defined” powers, and state government of “numerous and indefinite” powers.  We fight because the Left — forty-nine years after the Selma to Montgomery marches — still feels the need to continually subject various state and local voting jurisdictions to heavy-handed federal pre-clearance notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s recognition ever since South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) of the extraordinarily extra-constitutional nature of Sections 4-5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and its justification only on temporary grounds to combat the unique evil of Jim Crow-era racial intimidation at the ballot box.
• We fight because the Left views separation of powers as an inconvenient barrier to an imperial presidency; thus, Obama rewrites duly enacted laws by executive fiat, flagrantly violates the Congress’s own operating schedule when it hinders the advancement of his incestuous relationship with Big Labor, and leaks rumors of a massive unilateral amnesty that would surely constitute an impeachable offense were it not so politically suicidal for the opposition party to do so.  We fight because the Left threatens to use its own subversion of counter-majoritarianism and the institutional soundness of the U.S. Senate to salvage its unmitigated train wreck of a paradigmatic piece of statist legislation from a putatively controversial D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that did nothing other than interpret the clear-cut original meaning of an ill-designed incentive to force states to create their own health insurance exchanges.
• We fight because the Left abhors religious liberty and freedom of conscience — likening the pre-2012 dark ages of precluding religious employers from being forced to purchase abortifcacients for their employees to apartheid and Jim Crow.  We fight because the Left views the formerly anodyne Religious Freedom Restoration Act — which was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1993 after passing the House by unanimous consent and the Senate by a count of 97-3, where it was championed by right-wing extremists like Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer — as a gross infringement on a female employee’s “right” to have her devoutly religious boss pay for her contraception, and as such a legislative stain on the utopian secularist culture that ought be vitiated if not outright repealed.
• We fight because the Left seeks to continually extend the breadth and depth of its repulsive kid-killing culture — seeking to overturn virtually all state-level laws ensuring abattoir clinic sanitation and even proscribing state-level limits on late-term abortion under the “mental health” exception.  We fight because for the Left, the Benghazi and IRS targeting scandals are fake, Speaker Boehner’s lawsuit against the president’s running amok of our constitutional order is frivolous partisanship, but the “war on women” is real.  We fight because the Left’s dystopian vision for the future of American femininity can be encapsulated by Sandra Fluke and Lena Dunham.
• We fight because the Left is intellectually fatigued — the president continually relies on his easy money and debt-binge-abetting sycophants at the Federal Reserve to boost the economy via asset inflation, notwithstanding the post-2008 Bernanke/Yellen Fed’s crippling effects on the elderly and fixed-income savers, the lowest post-recession growth rates since World War II, and the post-Dodd-Frank reality of legislatively entrenched Too Big to Fail.  We fight because the Left, which likes to pretend like it represents the little guy, is perpetually in bed with Big Business: just as constitutional conservatives all across the country resist dalliances with the corporate welfare- and amnesty-seeking Chamber of Commerce, left-wing populist hero and quasi-Marxist demagogue Sen. Elizabeth Warren is forced to defend the blatantly cronyist Export-Import Bank in order to save face.
• We fight because the Left, in all its morally relativistic, anti-Judeo-Christian, and Islamophilic doldrums, proffers a remarkably specious and wholly untenable moral equivalence in the current conflict between our staunch allies in the liberal Western-style democracy of Israel, and the terrorists in Hamas who are just as much a part of the global jihad as are al-Qaeda or ISIS.  We fight because we alone have the moral clarity to recognize good and recognize evil, and to authoritatively resist the sort of noxious blood libel and Jew hatred that invariably poses under the rote Leftist sloganeering of “free Gaza” and “free Palestine.”  We fight because we alone can recognize that grotesque anti-Zionism is little different from the anti-Semitism of old.

For the future of our republic, it is imperative that Leftists be stopped in their tracks.  They are wrong and they are dangerous.  When Benjamin Franklin spoke of “a republic — if you can keep it,” it was with folks precisely like contemporary Leftists in mind.

I look forward to working with all of you to advance our cause, and to joining the RedState community.

In liberty,

Josh