> When it comes to unilateral actions, the president is mostly Commander in Chief of our military. Meaning, he could pull all our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and close Gitmo tomorrow just by saying so.

Unless, for instance, any of that required spending money, and Congress explicitly forbade spending money for the purpose. Or Congress otherwise prohibited the military from doing what the President wanted to direct.

Commander-in-Chief doesn't mean "dictator", it means that Congress' power to "make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces" is limited so as not to allow them to vote to have someone other than, and independent of the authority of, the President direct how the military will operate within the rules Congress has set, it doesn't give the President independent authority to set the rules on his own, or to direct the military in a manner contrary to the rules established by Congress.

> Unless, for instance, any of that required spending money, and Congress explicitly forbade spending money for the purpose. Or Congress otherwise prohibited the military from doing what the President wanted to direct.

Wait, can Congress do that? I know that they approve budgets obviously, but I thought all they could do was allocate it to different departments. I didn't think they could say, "here's this money but you can only use it for this purpose.. you absolutely cannot use it for this other purpose". I thought their only way of stopping some part of the government from doing something was to create a law removing that authority. And it's hard to imagine them removing the military's authority from withdrawing from a war. :)

> Wait, can Congress do that?

Yes.

> I know that they approve budgets obviously, but I thought all they could do was allocate it to different departments. I didn't think they could say, "here's this money but you can only use it for this purpose.. you absolutely cannot use it for this other purpose".

Not only can they do that, that is usually how they allocate money. Even when there is some flexibility in how the funds are spent, that flexibility is defined in the law appropriating the funds.

> And it's hard to imagine them removing the military's authority from withdrawing from a war.

Withdrawing from a war is an unlikely thing for Congress to act to bar, sure, but that's not because they couldn't, just because they would be unlikely to choose to. Closing the detention facility at Guantanamo, well, that's a different story. While they haven't exactly prohibited it, they've removed funds for it from budgets and prohibited the specific steps the administration proposed to take to do it (such as transferring prisoners from Guantanamo to the US.)

We all understand that, but we all know that the boss is the face of his workers' shortcomings/winnings.