Actually, the Obama administration hopes to keep “welcoming the debate” until it goes away. Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the AUMF made that clear — if just about nothing else.

As the U.S. terror war spreads throughout Africa and beyond, plenty of questions remain. Among them:

Does the Obama administration support repealing the AUMF?

“We did not come here this morning equipped to answer that question,” admitted Pentagon General Counsel Stephen Preston. Nor did the administration’s two witnesses come prepared to answer other fundamental questions, like:

If it isn’t repealed, how should the AUMF be “refined”?

That’s not clear either, as this exchange between Preston and Sen. Ron Johnson, R‐​Wis., revealed: