Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) strongly hinted he would filibuster President Obama’s three nominees to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the second most powerful court in the country. And Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) even introduced legislation to strip three seats from this court in order to prevent Obama from filling them. Earlier today, however, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) indicated he would not go along with such efforts to keep this powerful court in Republican hands. “Elections have consequences” McCain told a group of reporters, after saying he’s “always believed” that the judicial nominees deserve an up-or-down vote unless there are extraordinary circumstances justifying a filibuster.

With the recent confirmation of Judge Sri Srinivasan, the DC Circuit’s active judges are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Five of the court’s six senior judges — partially retired judges who hear reduced caseloads — are Republicans, however. So the court is currently dominated by conservatives. Should Obama’s nominees be confirmed, the Democratic active judges will be able to overrule any decision by a conservative panel by agreeing to hear cases “en banc” — a process which allows all fully active judges to weigh in on a case. With Obama’s three nominees, Democratic appointees would enjoy a 7-4 majority on an en banc panel.

In the interim, however, the court’s Republican judges have wielded their dominance to write their own policy preferences into the law. Two George W. Bush appointees struck down clean air regulations that would have prevented “between 13,000 and 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 non-fatal heart attacks, 19,000 hospital and emergency room visits and 1.8 million days of missed work or school for each year.” Another panel of three conservatives handed down a decision earlier this year that would make much of American labor law completely unenforceable. A third opinion invalidated federal rules requiring employers to inform workers of their rights under federal labor law, and they did so in an opinion that was so broadly reasoned it could potentially invalidate laws requiring everything from fuel efficiency labels on new cars to nutritional labels on food.

Judge Jane Kelly, who was unanimously confirmed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit yesterday, is among President Obama’s most outstanding nominees. She graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for a U.S Court of Appeals judge, and then spent the rest of her career in public service working as a public defender. She’s also young. Young enough that she could be a potential Supreme Court nominee for at least two full presidential terms. In other words, she’s exactly the sort of nominee Senate Republicans love to filibuster — a brilliant attorney with a left-leaning resume who could someday be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States.

As it turns out, however, obstructionism can be overcome if the right person writes a letter on your behalf to the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

With [Sen. Chuck] Grassley in a University of Iowa Hospital bed, a Republican county chairman and small-town lawyer named David Hansen went out and campaigned for him, the senator explained at Kelly’s confirmation hearing in February. “And you know, you don’t find county chairman doing that that often in our state,” Grassley said. “I won that primary and won that election obviously, and he gets all the credit for it.”

Once in office, Grassley remembered the effort. Grassley says he twice suggested Hansen for federal bench positions: first to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa during the Reagan administration and then to the Eighth Circuit during the George H.W. Bush administration. “He’s been a friend of mine as well,” Grassley said of Hansen, now an Eighth Circuit senior judge, on the Senate floor Wednesday.

The connection to Kelly’s nomination: She clerked in the Eighth Circuit for Hansen during 1992 and 1993. Hansen sent Grassley a hand-written note supporting Kelly, noting that she has an “exceptionally keen intellect” and “will be a welcome addition to the court if confirmed.”

Now, let’s be clear. It is fantastic news that Kelly is now a judge. Beyond the fact that she is talented and that she adds another name to the short list of potential Supreme Court nominees in a Democratic administration, former public defenders are very rare on the federal bench (by contrast, President Obama nominated 100 former prosecutors to be federal judges). Judge Kelly earned her seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals through hard work and solid legal work, and the fact that her former boss testified to her “exceptionally keen intellect” is just one more data point demonstrating that she belongs on the bench.

But a person shouldn’t have to be friends with a guy who is friends with Chuck Grassley in order to avoid a grueling confirmation process. Thanks in large part to Grassley’s intervention, Kelly was confirmed just 83 days after her nomination. The average even for uncontroversial Obama nominees is 272 days. And, of course, it remains likely that a person with Kelly’s credentials would have been filibustered if it were not for her former boss’ connection to Grassley — just as other, potential future Supreme Court nominees have been filibustered in the past.

Ultimately, however, the arbitrariness of Senate obstructionism does not have to remain a reality forever. Senate Democrats can eliminate this problem by changing the filibuster and “blue slip” rules that allow a minority of the Senate to block exceptionally qualified judicial nominees.

On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is scheduled to hold a confirmation hearing for Tom Perez, the current Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and President Obama’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Labor. As if on cue, four of the Obama Administration’s perpetual gadflies — Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Patrick McHenry (R-NC) & Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — released a report yesterday with the breathless title “DOJ’s Quid Pro Quo with St. Paul: How Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez Manipulated Justice and Ignored the Rule of Law.” The report accuses Perez of brokering a “quid pro quo” deal where DOJ agreed to keep out of a potential fraud lawsuit against the city of St. Paul if St. Paul agreed to withdraw a civil rights case that was pending before the Supreme Court. Here’s what actually happened:

1. Perez’s Actions Likely Saved A Key Prong Of Federal Fair Housing Law

The federal Fair Housing Act forbids most landlords, realtors, mortgage lenders and other people involved in selling or renting housing from engaging in racial, gender, religious or several other forms of discrimination. Like all discrimination cases, however, these lawsuits are notoriously difficult to prove because they turn upon the secret reasons why banks and property owners decide to deal with certain people and not others. There’s nothing illegal about renting to a white couple when a black couple also wanted the same unit, or about denying a home loan to a woman or a minority — unless, of course, the decision not to rent to the black couple or to deny the loan was made because of their gender or minority status.

For this reason, civil rights law provides several mechanisms that allow victims of discrimination to pursue cases without first having to develop a talent for mind-reading. One of the most important of these mechanisms is “disparate impact” lawsuits, which allow a court to infer discrimination if an renter or lender’s policies consistently lead to women or minorities winding up with the short end of the stick. Thus, for example, Perez’s Civil Rights Division won a $335 million settlement from the mortgage lender Countrywide, after it discovered that Countrywide “charged higher fees and rates to more than 200,000 minority borrowers across the country than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk.” In one year, for example, “Countrywide employees charged Hispanic applicants in Los Angeles an average of $545 more in fees for a $200,000 loan than they charged non-Hispanic white applicants with similar credit histories.” DOJ was able to use this pattern of discrimination to win this settlement, thanks to the concept of disparate impact, even though they never uncovered a smoking gun document where Countrywide’s senior management openly confessed to racial discrimination.

While the Supreme Court has never considered whether disparate impact suits are permitted under the Fair Housing Act, all nine of the federal appeals courts to consider the question held that they are. Chief Justice Roberts, however, crusaded against these kinds of lawsuits for more than 30 years, and when an unusually weak Fair Housing claim reached the Supreme Court in 2011, many court observers feared that the conservative justices would use it an opportunity to gut the Fair Housing Act and forbid disparate impact housing suits. Perez helped convince the city of St. Paul, which brought that very weak case to the Supreme Court’s attention, to withdraw its appeal — potentially saving much of federal fair housing law in the process.

2. DOJ’s Leading Expert On Cases Alleging Fraud Against The Federal Government Called For DOJ To Dismiss The Fraud Lawsuit. In His Words, “This Case Sucks.”

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As ThinkProgress has previously explained, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is the second most powerful court in the country. It’s also a bastion of right-wing jurisprudence thanks in no small part to Senate Republican filibusters. Two George W. Bush appointees on this court recently struck down clean air regulations that would have prevented “between 13,000 and 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 non-fatal heart attacks, 19,000 hospital and emergency room visits and 1.8 million days of missed work or school for each year.” Three conservative members of the court handed down a decision earlier this year that would make much of American labor law completely unenforceable, and render an important agency created to check Wall Street impotent to boot. At least two of the Court’s judges believe that all business, workplace or Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect.

Time, however, is a harsh mistress, and several of the court’s older Republican appointees have taken partial retirement in the last several years. As a result, this court that once boasted one of the most lopsided lineups in the country now is split 4-3 between Democratic and Republican appointees. Moreover, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing Wednesday on the nomination of Sri Srinivasan to the DC Circuit, a nominee brimming with conservative endorsers and past jobs working for Republican judges and administrations. If Srinivasan is confirmed, Republican-appointees will no longer have a majority among the active judges on the nation’s second-highest court. If another Obama nominee is confirmed to one of the three remaining vacancies, Republican-appointees will be in the minority.

Which explains why Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) used Srinivasan’s hearing to introduce legislation ensuring that this won’t happen:

I would like to spend a couple minutes discussing the D.C. Circuit. As most of my colleagues know, the D.C. Circuit is the least busy circuit in the country. In fact, it ranks last or almost last in nearly every category that measures workload.

Based on the 2012 statistics from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the D.C. Circuit has the fewest number of appeals filed per authorized judgeship, with 108. By way of comparison, the 11th Circuit ranks first with over 5 times as many appeals filed per authorized judgeship, with 583. . . . Given this imbalance in workload, today I am introducing the Court Efficiency Act. A number of my colleagues are co-sponsoring the legislation, including Senators Hatch, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, Lee, Cruz and Flake.

This legislation is straightforward. It would add a seat to the Second and the Eleventh Circuits. At the same time, it would reduce the number of authorized judgeships for the D.C. Circuit from 11 to 8.

While it is true that the DC Circuit’s caseload is relatively small in terms of raw numbers, Grassley’s statistics are highly misleading. Unlike other federal courts of appeal, the DC Circuit hears an unusually large number of major regulatory and national security cases, many of which require very specialized legal research, involve intensely long records, and take more time for a judge to process than four or five normal cases of the kinds heard in other circuits. The caseloads outside of the DC Circuit include many routine sentencing, immigration and other cases of the kinds that are often dispatched with in brief orders drafted by staff attorneys (who then have these orders approved by judges). The DC Circuit, by contrast, hears far fewer of these easy cases that require very little work on the part of judges.

Indeed, it’s likely that even Chuck Grassley understands that Chuck Grassley’s numbers are misleading. In 2005, Grassley voted to confirm Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a Bush appointee to the DC Circuit. Brown was the tenth active judge on the DC Circuit when she took her seat. Shortly thereafter, Grassley voted to confirm Judge Thomas Griffith. Griffith was the eleventh active judge on the DC Circuit at the time of his confirmation.

Now that President Obama is naming judges, however, Grassley suddenly thinks the DC Circuit is so underworked that it needs just eight judges. This isn’t credible. If Grassley tries to use this excuse in the future to block an Obama nominee to the DC Circuit, Senate Democrats can respond by nuking the filibuster and making Grassley’s transparently self-serving views irrelevant.

A disgruntled Justice Department attorney turned conservative blogger writes an unsubstantiated post, and suddenly taxpayers have to pay for a massive, two and a half year long investigation in order to placate Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). At least, that’s one of the biggest takeaways from a more than 250 page report released by the Justice Department’s Inspector General yesterday. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent the Inspector General’s (IG) office on similar goose chases. Neither one of them achieved more than wasted time and money.

An entire chapter of the report stems from a blog post written by J. Christian Adams, a conservative activist hired to work in Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Bush Administration as part of efforts to stack the department with conservative hires. Adams left DOJ, and later went on to represent Tea Party Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

In his post, Adams claims that the division “provided preferential treatment when responding to records requests from civil rights groups or individuals alleged to support ‘liberal’ issues in comparison to requests from Republicans or individuals or organizations alleged to support ‘conservative’ issues,” and the IG spends nearly 30 pages investigating these allegations due to a request from Rep. Wolf. Their conclusion: “Our review did not find any substantiation of ideological favoritism or political interference” in responding to requests for information.

Wolf also joined with Rep. Smith to demand a second investigation into whether the Department behaved improperly in dismissing voter intimidation claims against members of the New Black Panthers Party (NBPP) — a common conspiracy theory touted by Fox News and others on the far right. Despite the fact that an investigation by DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility already concluded that Justice Department attorneys “acted appropriately[] in the exercise of their supervisory duties in connection with the dismissal of the three defendants in the NBPP case,” the IG’s report spends 28 pages reexamining this well-trodden ground. Its conclusion: “we did not find evidence to conclude that the political appointees approved the decision” to dismiss most of the allegations against the NBPP “for improper partisan or racial considerations.”

Sen. Grassley, for his part, demanded an investigation into whether Obama Administration officials engaged in politicized hiring, the IG concludes that hiring decisions were based on entirely appropriate considerations, such as “litigation experience involving voting rights” or “a high degree of academic and professional achievement.” By the end of the report — which also examines DOJ’s conduct during the Bush Administration and comes to far less benign conclusions — the reader is so sick of reading words like “did not find any substantiation” or “no evidence of” applied to allegations against the Obama Justice Department, that the whole report begins to blur together. A few reporters have jumped on a finding that Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez was unaware of who within the Department handled certain parts of the NBPP case when he testified before a Republican-led probe into that matter. But if that’s the worst thing the IG’s office can find during a more than two year long investigation, Perez must have been doing a pretty good job.

So the Civil Rights Division’s current leadership emerges from this investigation largely unscathed, and the three members of Congress that drove much of its content look like petty and credulous. But there is another, more important problem that emerges from this report.

A 250 page report examining years of Justice Department efforts is not something that can be produced overnight. Or over a month. Or over a few months. Literally thousands of hours of work must have gone into this investigation, much of it by attorneys and other professional staff who aren’t exactly cheap to hire — and that’s just counting the people in the IG’s office who conducted the report.

In the course of this investigation, the IG’s office “conducted more than 135 interviews with more than 80 individuals currently or previously employed by the Department,” including interviews with “Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, former Associate Deputy Attorney General (and current Solicitor General) Donald Verrilli, Counsel to the Attorney General Aaron Lewis, Deputy Associate Attorney General Samuel Hirsch, and Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, and former Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King.” All of these well-compensated officials had to stop working on their real jobs in order to accommodate this investigation, not to mention the time they and their staffs spent preparing for those interviews, or the opportunity costs that resulted from this investigation. No administration is perfect and it is likely that there are legitimate concerns that the IG can and should have investigated these past two years, rather than getting bogged down in doubtful partisan allegations.

At a time when House Republicans claim we must slash food stamps and strip health care from millions of Americans in order to reduce the nation’s deficit, it is impossible to justify the expense of paying those officials of all of that work-time in order to accommodate this wild goose chase.