to organize teams, prepared and willing to force and transport firearms into washington, to come to the capitol grounds, to breach an attempt to take capitol grounds and building on january 6th. so it appears, chuck, from my initial reading that this is the first time the federal government has ever alleged there are specific plans to enter the capitol. up until just now all the conspiracy charges have said that these people communicated, planned to come to washington, planned to be armed, stayed together, planned to travel to capitol hill, planned to attend the rally, planned to go to the capitol, but there s never been an allegation by the government that there was a plan a well-developed plan in advance to enter the capitol and try to stop the vote. so so this appears to be the first of these. pete, i don t want to presume anything there and i know you want to get to reading, i m going to bring in joyce vance to
that. so joe manchin joined in the effort to come together and get a bill which he thought could get ten republican senators to join on to and have 60, not to do it by the majority rules rules, but do it with the 60 votes that the senate requires unfortunately. so there was movement. there was work and what we did, we didn t pass hr-1 again, we passed the manchin bill again, the freedom to vote act. i think it s unfair to sort of say they re just sitting on there keep passing stuff that won t pass. i think this bill, frankly i didn t see sinema s speech so i m not sure exactly what she said, but my thought was this bill had 50 votes for it plus the vice president so it had enough votes to pass, but it didn t have enough votes to suspend the rules and make an exception on the filibuster
specific. he ll talk about solutions and the actual process he s calling for in the senate to make this happen. to get these two bills across the finish line. you ve got this john lewis go ahead. go ahead, jeff, voyeur. i m just saying quickly so people know what we re talking about, the two bills, the john lewis voting rights act, which would restore pre-clearance and give federal oversight of those voting laws in states that have a history of discrimination, and the freedom to vote act, which would do a number of things, make election day a national holiday, allow same-day voter registration and allow mail-in ballots for anyone who would request them. those are the two specific bills that the house have now passed that are now langishing in the senate. and it seems that that second bill has a very high cliff to climb to get through. that s right. that s the real political risk, jose, at least in the short-term, is that you have the president potentially raising expectations
democrats continue to stress the need to pass voting rights legislation headed into the new year. this month president biden called voting rights the single biggest thing domestically. and the vice president said passing voting rights legislation is about preserving the integrity of our democracy. but without 50 members of the senate in support of changing the filibuster rules, the path to getting a bill to the president s desk is uncertain at best. let s bring in our capitol hill correspondent. pretty big words from the white house on voting rights. is the president leaning on the senate to get this done? where are they supposed to be focussing? everywhere. and that s really how we ended the year on the hill. some of my last conversations with lawmakers were about the path forward on build back better and the path forward on voting rights. that s also how they re going to start the year. trying to contend with how they move forward on biden s signature legislative package
future will also go down that rabbit hole, unfortunately. and we decided to do a hunger strike because we were seeing that there wasn t any urgency from our decision makers to move the freedom to vote act across the finish line, and we decided to do the hunger strike because it s really a moral play. right? this is not a partisan issue to save our democracy. everything we do, everything we love, all of our futures and dreams really hang in the balance of our decision makers to prioritize our democracy and pass the freedom to vote act. what is the status right now of the strike and do you plan to return to it if there s no movement here? at the moment we suspended our strike as of a few weeks ago. and that was in response to senate majority leader chuck schumer putting out a statement saying that they will consider voting rights as early as the first week they come back which