Currently, the nominees are voted on one by one, a time-consuming process that has only gotten slower as Democrats throw up blanket procedural roadblocks to oppose the Trump administration.

“We want to get this done prior to the upcoming Rosh Hashanah recess,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), the Senate majority whip. “So we have three weeks that we’re here. We want to move by next week.”

The change mirrors one proposed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who, as Rules Committee chairwoman, pressed for leadership to be able to call up 10 nominees from the same committee at once. But Barrasso said there might be no upper bound on the number of nominees who can be bundled on the floor.

Separately, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who is coleading a working group on the rules change, suggested that the committee requirement may not initially apply, given the 140-plus nominees awaiting a vote on the floor.

“That is our intention moving forward. That may not be the case from the outset, because so many have been moved forward and are on the calendar,” he said.

The change, should Republicans gather the votes needed for it to pass, would represent a further departure from Senate precedent. Both parties have gone “nuclear” over the last decade to exempt nominees from the filibuster and shorten the amount of debate time before the Senate can vote.

Republicans have noted Klobuchar’s proposal to urge Democrats to support the revised rule on a bipartisan basis, but at this point, the change is expected to be a party-line exercise. Democrats have delayed virtually every nominee over a slate of Trump administration actions they say are illegal.

“We’ve given them time,” Schmitt said. “Many of us have reached out and talked to Democrats in the interim, and some of them say the right things, but they’re not prepared to really, I think what they view is capitulate to President Trump by just having nominees that are noncontroversial move forward. And that’s a problem.”

Barrasso told the Washington Examiner that there is an emerging Republican “consensus” on moving nominees in batches, with the Wednesday meeting intended to get the conference comfortable with the change.

Previously, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) had expressed reservations about a go-it-alone approach to changing Senate rules.

It is not yet clear whether the rules update will include judicial nominees. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) indicated the focus is on the executive branch, though he left the door open to a broader change.

Regardless, Republicans have said Cabinet, Supreme Court, and circuit court nominees would not be eligible for batch votes.

“It’s the executive calendar, and it’s the endless delays that the Democrats are forcing and the complete abandonment of prior precedent and practice,” Thune said.

“So the judiciary, you know, we’ll see,” he added. “We’re still having conversations about that, but as of right now, at least, our focus is largely on the zero executive branch noms that President Trump has been allowed to move by consent here in the Senate.”

In the case of debate time, most nominees only require two hours, down from 30 hours, and Barrasso suggested that it could drop further.

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He stated that senators spend an average of two minutes on speeches for the typical nominee and that only seven nominees required debate time of 10 minutes or longer.

“This is an abuse of the Senate privileges,” Barrasso said, calling the committee review process a sufficient vetting of nominees.