As I blogged about before, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats are extremely frustrated with Tom Coburn. Since Coburn is blocking more than 80 of their big spending bills, they can't appease their special interest cronies. So Reid has decided to create a 398-page, lard-stuffed, omnibus bill composed of more than 30 of those blocked bills. Preliminary estimates suggest that it authorizes over $11 billion in new spending...without any spending offsets. And it would create at least 36 new government programs.

One of those blocked bills is the Captive Primate Safety Act, which spends $17 million preventing the interstate sale of monkeys.

According to Rob Bluey at RedState.com:

Coburn said the bills included in Reid's omnibus have virtually no requirements for accountability, making it impossible to measure their effectiveness. "If we send a billion dollars in one direction, how do we know we accomplish what we intended to do?" he asked. "They refuse to put metrics on to hold people accountable. … It's the hard job that we're paid to do to provide oversight and get rid of waste, fraud and abuse."

Amanda Carpenter at Townhall.com adds:

Reid said the GOP would have a choice to pass these bills “or continue to stand beside a colleague or two intent on blocking virtually everything.” Reid singled out Coburn again in a news conference last week by telling reporters, "For those of you who may not know this, you cannot negotiate with Coburn. It's just something that you learn over the years is a waste of time."

Reid is desperate to move pass the energy debate since it's a losing issue for Democrats, so he could try to put the Monkey Pork bill on the Senate calendar for consideration as early as next week.