Top Senate Republican ready to 'roll over' Democrats with rule change to confirm Trump nominees

Before leaving Washington, D.C., to their respective home states, Senate Republicans were on the verge of a deal with their colleagues across the aisle to hammer out a deal to ram through dozens of Trump's picks for non-controversial positions.

"We need to either get a lot of cooperation from the Democrats, or we're going to have to roll over them with changes of the rules that we're going to be able to do in a unilateral way, as well as President Trump making recess appointments," he said.

Schumer, in response to Barrasso's public jab against him and Senate Democrats, contended in a statement that "historically bad nominees deserve a historic level of scrutiny by Senate Democrats."

Unilaterally changing the rules, or the nuclear option, would allow Republicans to make tweaks to the confirmation process without help from Democrats, but it could also kneecap further negotiations on key items that would require their support to advance beyond the Senate filibuster.

Barrasso was not worried about taking that route, however, and noted that the nominees that he and other Republicans were specifically considering would be "sub-Cabinet level positions" and ambassadors.

Up for discussion are changes to the debate time, what kind of nominee could qualify for a speedier process and whether to give the president runway to make recess appointments, which would require the Senate to go into recess and allow Trump to make appointments on a temporary basis.

"When you take a look at this right now, it takes a 30-minute roll-call vote to get on cloture, and then two hours of debate time, and then another 30-minute roll-call vote," Barrasso said. "Well, that's three hours, and it's time when you can't do legislation, you can't do any of the other things."

But there is a menu of key items that Congress will have to deal with when they return, particularly the deadline to fund the government by Sept. 30.

Barrasso acknowledged that reality, and noted that it was because of the hefty schedule that he wanted a rules change to be put front and center.

"There's not going to be any time to - or there's going to be limited time, I should say, to actually get people through the nominations process, which is just going to drag on further, and you'll have more people having hearings and coming out of committees," he said.  

"This backlog is going to worsen this traffic jam at the Schumer toll booth. So, we are going to do something, because this cannot stand."