WJI's Daily Reads for Jan. 18, 2022

WBAY: Proposal to lower age for concealed carry.

Currently, a Wisconsin resident needs to be 21 before they can apply for a concealed carry permit. The GOP-backed bill would lower it to 18.

Oprah Daily: Claudette Colvin's 1955 arrest record for civil rights protest expunged. 

As a teenager in 1955, (Claudette) Colvin famously protested Alabama's prejudiced bus segregation laws. In March of that year—months before the December Montgomery Bus Boycotts—she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger and was forcibly detained by Montgomery police then held in an adult jail cell. She later said she was inspired by recent school lessons about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

“When a white woman got on the bus and the driver told me to get up from my seat so she could sit down, I felt that [Tubman and Truth] each had a hand on my shoulders pushing me down,” Colvin told Oprah Daily in an interview last year. “History had me glued to the seat.” She would later become one of the original plaintiffs in the court case that brought Montgomery’s bus segregation to an end.

Howe on the Court: U.S. Supreme Court hearing free speech case about Boston City Hall flags.

Politico: Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sends questions to Texas Supreme Court in case challenging abortion law.

The 2-1 court decision held that there was too much ambiguity around the meaning of the Texas law to allow federal courts to continue to act on the legal challenge without definitive guidance from Texas’s top court.

“The unresolved questions of state law must be certified to the Texas Supreme Court,” wrote Judge Edith Jones, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, in an opinion joined by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was appointed by President Donald Trump.

Marijuana Moment: Congressman hoping for progress on marijuana banking bill.