This Independence Day weekend certainly does not bring a respite from campaigning—I am in the midst of a busy four-day stretch of appearances in more than a dozen communities from one end of the district to the other.

I hope that you will find time for moment of reflection this weekend.  Two hundred thirty-four years ago, the signers of the Declaration of Independence set in motion the world’s longest and most successful experiment in self-government.  Their courage as they pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” in Philadelphia shaped the American idea in a fundamental way.

The heated political debates of the moment—and they are heated for the simple reason that the stakes are indeed high—would not be possible without the conviction that animated the Declaration of Independence that individuals and communities can and have a right to shape their own destiny.

In the America that was forged by those ideas, we all tend to that kind of freedom for granted.  I hope that you enjoy what Americans once called without irony “the glorious Fourth” with family and friends and remember just how precious the freedoms we celebrate today are.