Josh Earnest: WH Awaits GOP Response Before Issuing War Plan Veto Threats

President Barack Obama will hold off on veto threats over his war authorization request to Congress to see how lawmakers respond to his proposal in the battle against the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL), White House spokesman Josh Earnest told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

Obama sent his request to Congress on Wednesday for war authorization against ISIS. The proposal asked for no restrictions for U.S. forces during a three-year period, though it stated the plan would not include "enduring offensive ground combat operations."

"What's clear to the president right now is that deploying an enduring offensive ground combat operation in Iraq and in Syria would not be in the national security interests of the United States. We haven't seen a specific proposal from Republicans, so we're going to let this work its way through the legislative process before we start issuing veto threats," Earnest said Friday.

Earnest said the reason why Obama asked for the authorization was because he felt lawmakers "should have a role to play in this debate," adding the president also felt Congress should "constrain the executive branch in this measure, but not overly so."

The period of three years was determined because a one-year authorization would  "overly constrain his ability and the ability of our military planners to actually put in place a strategy and give it some time to make some progress," he said.

"Given the pace of success that we've seen in the first six months of this strategy, we would anticipate that three years from now the threat that is posed by ISIL will look different than it looks now," he said.

After three years, he said Obama envisioned that Congress would "take another look at what the executive branch is doing and what the military is doing to take the fight to ISIL."

"Three years is an appropriate period of time for them to do that," Earnest said. "This legislative proposal that we have sent to Congress is a starting point for continued legislative negotiations. And, Congress needs to work its will."

Watch the video here.

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