• Mark Rozzi, a rank-and-file member of the Pennsylvania House who unexpectedly became speaker as a compromise candidate, said he hopes to keep the post even as power shifts, saying, "I know how to count votes, first of all."
• Natalie Price, a Michigan legislator, went to the Capitol despite testing positive for covid, saying she wore a mask, stayed 6 feet away from everyone and voted from the gallery, but a political foe called it "pretty hypocritical" in light of opinion during the early days of the pandemic.
• Michael Card, a former political strategist and political science professor in South Dakota, cited an information vacuum and a missed opportunity, saying "it is not a good thing for our democracy" that Gov. Kristi Noem declines to make herself available to the press during the legislative session.
• Philip Prewitt stepped down as an administrative judge in Missouri after the state Supreme Court suspended his law license for threatening to reveal details of the infidelity of a political opponent's husband in hopes of dissuading her from running against him.
• Brandon Kennedy, a Black resident of Shreveport, reached an unspecified settlement after claiming in a lawsuit that officers threw him to the ground, slammed his face into the sidewalk and detained him in a mental health unit in retaliation for criticizing the police.
• Phil Berger, Senate president pro tem in North Carolina, said the state's literacy test for voters dating back to the Jim Crow era, unenforceable since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, "ought to be out of our constitution."
• Quinton Lucas, mayor of Kansas City, Mo., hailed a project completed on time and on budget as a new $1.5 billion airport terminal prepares to open four years after the city broke ground.
• George Flaggs Jr., mayor of Vicksburg, Miss., reinstated a youth curfew after a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed, saying "If parents cannot keep their juvenile children off the streets and safe from danger, I have no choice but to step in and do that for them."