Attorney General Eric Holder can't explain constitutional basis for Obama's executive orders -- By Joel Gehrke, The Washington Examiner

Attorney General Eric Holder couldn't explain the constitutional basis for executive orders such as President Obama's delay of the employer mandate because he hasn't read the legal analysis -- or at least, hasn't seen it in a long time.

"I'll be honest with you, I have not seen -- I don't remember looking at or having seen the analysis in some time, so I'm not sure where along the spectrum that would come," Holder replied when Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked him to explain the nature of Obama's constitutional power to delay the mandate.

Lee had based his question on a standard legal test, first described by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who said the president's authority to issue executive orders is strongest when he does so with the backing of Congress (category one), more dubious when he issues an order pertaining to a topic on which Congress has not passed a law (category two), and weakest when the executive order is "incompatible with a congressional command" (category three), to use Lee's paraphrase.

Holder assured Lee that Obama's team accounts for Jackson's three-part analysis, but said he couldn't use that test to explain in any detail what kind of authority the president wielded when he delayed the employer mandate.

"I've not had a chance to look at, you know, for some time, exactly what the analysis was there, so I'm not sure that I would be able to put it in what category," Holder told Lee. He believes that Obama "is probably at the height of his constitutional power" in issuing an executive order to raise the minimum wage for workers who do business with the federal government, though, and concluded that the same is true for the employer mandate delay.

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