Attorney General lacks confidence in his opinion that the bill giving voting representation to DC is constitutional.

John McGinnis talks about Attorney General Eric Holder's "End Run Around the Rule of Law." The article concerns the constitutionality of giving a voting Representative to the District of Columbia. McGinnis sets the issue out very clearly:

It is the long standing practice of the Department of Justice to provide
constitutional analysis of any bill that may be presented to the President so
that the President can fulfill his constitutional duty of signing only bills
that are constitutional. As a result, the Office of Legal Counsel had previous
occasion to conclude that this giving voting representation to the District is
unconstitutional. According to uncontradicted news reports, the Obama
administration’s OLC affirmed the same conclusion.

If the Attorney General believed that this opinion was wrong, he could overrule it. Attorneys General previously have themselves rendered legal opinions. An opinion would provide a measure of accountability because General Holder would have to sign his name to a legal document that purported to show how to get around the Constitution’s clear requirement. Indeed, the Obama administration has argued that increasing the transparency of the legal process within the executive branch will increase respect for the rule of law. What better testament to that transparency than to allow us to compare the reasoning of the Attorney General with that of his own
legal counsel?

Instead, the Attorney General asked the office of Solicitor General at a time when there was no confirmed Solicitor General whether that office would be willing to defend the statute, if passed. The Solicitor General’s office has a long history of defending legislation if there is any credible basis for doing so. But it never opines on the constitutionality of pending legislation, because the question for the President in signing a bill is not whether the legislation might be defended by some argument in Court but whether the legislation is constitutional, not whether some Court might uphold it, but whether the President should give it his own unique constitutional
imprimatur.

If Holder truly believes the statute to be constitutional, he should set out his legal analysis for the world to see. Instead, he hid behind an opinion of the Solicitor General's office that didn't even respond to the correct question. Holder asked the Solicitor's office if it would defend the legislation. The real question is the constitutionality of the statute, not whether there is a colorable argument for constitutionality, the usual standard for defending legislation.

This suggests that Holder lacks confidence in his own position.

Attorney General Holder overrules Justice Department lawyers' opinion that DC voting rights bill is unconstitutional.

The Washington Post reports

Justice Department lawyers concluded in an unpublished opinion earlier this year
that the historic D.C. voting rights bill pending in Congress is
unconstitutional, according to sources briefed on the issue. But Attorney
General Eric H. Holder Jr., who supports the measure, ordered up a second
opinion from other lawyers in his department and determined that the legislation
would pass muster.

One can easily imagine the outcry if a Republican Attorney General had taken such an action against the advice of a Justice Department lawyers.

The story describes conflict within the departments in Justice:

In deciding that the measure is unconstitutional, lawyers in the department's Office of Legal Counsel matched a conclusion reached by their Bush administration counterparts nearly two years ago, when a lawyer there testified
that a similar bill would not withstand legal attack.

Holder rejected the advice and sought the opinion of the solicitor general's office, where lawyers told him that they could defend the legislation if it were challenged after its enactment.

Democratic and Republican Justice Department veterans said it is unusual, though not unprecedented, for the solicitor general, who backs the administration's position before the Supreme Court, to be asked to weigh in before a case makes its way into a courtroom. Typically, legal scholars said, the solicitor general is asked whether the office can plausibly defend a law in court, rather than to opine directly on the legality of a piece of legislation. The office was asked for the opinion several weeks ago, before the Senate confirmed Elena Kagan as the new solicitor general.

The Office of Legal Counsel found the proposal to be unconstitutional, just it had under President Bush. Holder then asked the Solicitor General's Office for an opinion. They opined that they could defend the position in court.

These are radically different questions. A lawyer may recommend that a proposal is unconstitutional and should not be enacted but can be defended in court if it is enacted. The first represents their advice as a lawyer as to whether the action should be taken. That latter only requires that a good faith argument of constitutionality exists. The lawyer may readily agree that the court should rule against the position advocated, but still think that a good faith argument for the position exists.

If the Post accurately describes the Solicitor General's Office's opinion - "that they could defend the legislation if it were challenged after its enactment," General Holder should not have overruled the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel. Doing so constitutes a gross politicization of the office of Attorney General.

The Post article includes this comment: "M. Edward Whelan III, who was a deputy at OLC during the Bush administration, said when informed of the matter that Holder's decision to override the office's conclusions amounted to a 'blatant abuse' of the office's purpose."

Clearly, the Attorney General has the authority to take the action he took. If the OLC indicates that the proposal is constitutional, he has some plausible argument to support his decision. If, however, it only says that an argument exists to offer to the courts, as indicated by the Post, he has no real support for his position, except his own unsupported opinion that is contradicted by his own lawyers.