By Kathleen Hunter, CQ Staff

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has given up on a package of unrelated, narrowly tailored legislative proposals that were bundled together to try to overcome opposition from Republican Sen. Tom Coburn .

The measure (S 3297) failed Monday to clear an initial procedural hurdle, and Reid, D-Nev., said he doesn’t intend to try again.

“You can go home and explain to your constituents how you refused to move forward on some of the most sensitive issues that are in our legislative portfolio in the Congress today,” Reid said on the Senate floor.

“We will not be able to take these up at a later time, and we’ll have to wait until a new Congress. And in the meantime, there will be much suffering and mental distress.”

At the direction of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., who instructed his caucus to keep the Senate talking about energy, Republicans foiled Reid’s plan to complete a wide range of bills with a single swipe.

Reid’s measure drew support from just three GOP senators and, by a vote of 52-40, fell eight votes short of the 60 required to limit debate on a motion to proceed to the package.

So Reid abandoned the so-called “Tomnibus” and focused on blaming Oklahoma’s Coburn and his fellow Republicans. Meanwhile, some other Democrats started looking ahead to September in the expectation that there might be an opportunity to put together another Coburn-circumventing bundle of bills.

Reid’s megabill gambit relied on finding 60 votes.

The presumption was that Republicans either liked enough segments of the package or were worried enough about campaign attacks to buck their leadership and vote with the Democrats.

Only three Republicans defected from the party line: Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, who both have difficult re-election races, and John W. Warner of Virginia, who is retiring.

Coleman and Smith were cosponsors of multiple bills in the package, which included proposals as wide-ranging as disease-specific research bills, environmental protection measures and legislation designed to encourage stability and stronger economies in foreign countries.

Coburn said he would try to negotiate changes to the individual bills in the package that would allow them to pass by voice vote.

“We’ll go back and try to work with everybody on the concerns we have with each the bills and see if we can get them so they can go through by unanimous consent,” Coburn said. “They shouldn’t be a package. The package was a way to try to get rid of one of the rights of the minority in the Senate.”