Well, actually it is surprising. There were multiple opportunities to kill the case quietly before it ever made it to conference... which would have been a much more logical way to do things.

It is not a complex case at all. Why help the case get all the way to a conference vote, only to reject it? That is the surprising part. If it had no merit, it should never have made it far enough through the process to get to a vote in the first place.

What this tells me is that the case serves some other purpose (in the movie) that we don't know about yet.