The Senate entered its summer recess last month without having reached a deal to confirm President Donald Trump's nominees.

In response, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, appears to be pursuing a "nuclear option" to overcome Democratic intransigence. 

Thune looks to change Senate filibuster rule for lower-level nominees

That according to Fox News, which noted in a report published on Monday that the South Dakota Republican is pushing a change to the rules for confirming lower-level nominees.

Specifically, Thune introduced a motion which would suspend the filibuster rule, which currently requires a 60-vote supermajority to overcome.

Fox News noted how Thune is not the first Senate majority leader to initiate a change to the body's rules in order to expedite confirmations.

Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did the same in 2013 as Republican lawmakers stymied the confirmation of then-President Barack Obama's cabinet secretaries.

His successor, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, took a similar course of action when he made Supreme Court nominees subject to a simple majority vote.

Thune warns that Democrats are suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome"

Thune's move came after The Hill reported that Democrats "are under heavy pressure from their base to show more fight against Trump."

"Democrats have not allowed a single civilian Trump nominee to pass by unanimous consent or voice vote — even when Democrats have ultimately ended up supporting the nomination in significant numbers," Thune was quoted as saying at the time.

"It’s a whole new precedent, and what goes around comes around," the South Dakota lawmaker said of his Democratic colleagues.

"There’s a lot of 'Trump derangement syndrome' that is afflicting the other side of the aisle, but if they keep this up, this is not going to end well. I just think this creates a whole new precedent," he added.

Trump says Senate Democrats are engaging in "political extortion"

For his part, the president took aim at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in an August post on Truth Social after he demanded that billions of dollars worth of foreign aid and National Institutes of Health funding be restored as a condition for confirming nominees.

Trump decried Schumer's demands as "egregious and unprecedented," insisting that Schumer was committing "political extortion, by any other name."

The president then advised Senate Republicans that they should "[t]ell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL!"