Today marks the 235th birthday of our great nation. Let’s celebrate the land of the free and the home of the brave!

We will not publish a Brief today, but will return with our normal schedule Tuesday. Have a blessed and safe Independence Day! And be sure to take your kids to a Fourth of July parade. New research from Harvard says it helps make kids conservative.

“Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should. Happy Fourth of July.” –Ronald Reagan, Independence Day, 1981

“[T]he flames kindled on the Fourth of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.” –Thomas Jefferson, 1821

Also, don’t miss Mark Alexander’s essays, TIME on the Constitution: Does It Still Matter?, and American Patriot Defined.