Thursday marks the first anniversary since the deadly U.S. Capitol attack to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and earlier this week Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that the chamber will soon vote on easing filibuster rules in an effort to advance stalled voting legislation.

Senator Schumer stated that the Senate “must evolve” and will debate and consider the rule changes by Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 17th. The filibuster requires Senate bills to pass on a 60 vote threshold rather than a simple majority as the chamber is currently made up of 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats and two Independents who caucus with the Democrats. Schumer seeks to remove the filibuster as the Democrats’ voting rights package has been stalled in a 50-50 vote. Senator Charles Grassley hopes the filibuster challenge will fail, “I don’t want them to be successful at it, none of the 50 Republicans want them to be successful at it. But if they are successful in doing it they’re going to be mighty disappointed maybe before the end of this year because they could end up being in the minority.”

Changing filibuster rules would require all 50 of Democratic votes. Democrats have been pushing to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act as Republican-controlled state legislatures across the U.S. including Iowa passed more restrictive voting legislation in the past year on a simple majority. Republicans described the legislation as an election integrity measure, though the last criminal conviction of election fraud in Iowa was in 2017 according to The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.