Last month, Jim Cooper told The Tennessean editorial board that he thought health care reform was still on "life support," and then layed out a potential scenario that would further strengthen the hand of his fellow Conservadems in the Senate who want to kill the public option. The scenario he drew up (likely in the hopes it would become reality) was that there would be no conference committee, and that the Senate would simply tell the House to swallow whatever horrible language they came up with:

Can you sort of walk us through your sense of where things now are headed. What the Senate will do and what will come back to the House?

"The simple view is the Senate will act and it will send that bill to conference. ... They will work out the differences between the House and the Senate, then we will vote on the same bill and see if that passes and go to the president. As you peel back the layers, you discover that there are a number of senators, like those who are upset about the debt ceiling increase, who say they are not going to send it to conference. They're going to say to the House "take it or leave it," because they know how difficult it is to get 60 votes over there and they don't want the bill to vary at all from what they know can pass with 60 votes. They are right to say they have very little leeway. If you peel back the layers further you realize that it may be more difficult than people realize for the Senate to vote on anything. ..."

And today, according to a report by Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post, it seems that Cooper's desired endgame may in fact be coming to pass:

The health care reform bill that passes the Senate might be the one that ends up on President Obama's desk, bypassing the usual House-Senate conference committee and avoiding another 60-vote threshold to end a filibuster.

There is increased chatter on Capitol Hill about a possible "ping-ponging" of the Senate health care bill: that chamber would pass its health care bill, send it to the House and the House would be asked to pass it with no changes and send it directly to the president.

With no conference committee, there is no way to fix any of the damage that the handful of Conservative senators ostensibly on the "Democratic" side of the aisle -- Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman -- will be able to inflict on the bill in the coming days, which may very well include killing the public option.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, a leader of the House Progressive Caucus, responded:

"The whole point is we tolerated negotiated rates and tolerated having to watch the Senate work its machinations, with the whole hope that in conference the House will go in strong," said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "For a lot of progressives that have relied on conference as the vehicle to save the public option, it becomes a very, very difficult vote."

Grijalva told HuffPost that the strategy would require progressives to back down so that the president could get a symbolic win. "Progressives will be jammed into a corner and once again asked, 'You've got to do this for the president so he can give a State of the Union address,'" he said. "As much as the State of the Union becomes critical, this is not something we can get beaten up on to vote for."

Cooper has long attempted to use the Senate as cover for his own desire to water down real health care reform at the behest of the insurance industry. Previously, his refrain was that Senate Democrats didn't have 60 votes, and therefore House Democrats needed to create a weaker bill in the name of "bipartisanship." And now, in the closing days of this debate, Cooper is more than happy to give his Conservadem colleagues in the Upper House not only the upper hand, but the final word, on the shape of this legislation.

All according to plan for Jim Cooper and the Blue Dogs.