What’s in Obama’s proposed military force authorization? And what’s the point?

This Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, would give the President the authority to wage a military campaign against ISIS, the radical terror group waging war in Iraq and Syria.

You mean the terror group the U.S. has been bombing since August?

Yes, that’s the one.

Obama authorized a first series of airstrikes against ISIS targets inside Iraq in early August 2014 and the U.S. has since been leading an international coalition of Western and Arab nations waging an air campaign against ISIS while providing support to local fighters on the ground.

In September, the U.S. expanded its airstrikes to Syria, where ISIS controls broad swaths of territory.

And for the last six months, Obama has leaned on AUMF resolutions from 2001 and 2002 as the basis for his authority.

Nearly every lawmaker on Capitol Hill agrees the U.S. needs to pass some kind of legislation to authorize the ongoing war against ISIS.

But they don’t all agree on what that kind of resolution should look like.

Already, top Republicans on Capitol Hill on Wednesday criticized the White House draft, asserting that it ties the President’s hands too much. (Yes, there’s a slight irony in Republicans wanting to give Obama more power — and CNN’s Athena Jones has you covered with this story.)

Some Democrats will bend in the opposite direction, insisting the AUMF is too vague and what the President can and can’t do needs to be more specifically defined — think defining “enduring offensive ground combat operations.”

But the interesting thing in this debate is that it’s not completely partisan and at the margins you have more hawkish Democrats and Republicans who are loath to expand the U.S military footprint abroad.

CNN