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Last week, before taking the mug shot seen around the world, Donald Trump made news in a different way, suggesting in an interview with Fox Business that if he’s elected president, he’ll impose a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on foreign imports. “When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay automatically, let’s say, a 10 percent tax,” Trump said. “I do like the 10 percent for everybody.”

This proposal provoked a predictable storm of criticism from pundits and economists, who correctly pointed out that a universal tariff would raise prices for consumers, hurt American businesses that rely on imported goods, and lead inevitably to a trade war that would do serious damage to American exporters. (It would also almost certainly violate World Trade Organization rules, not that Trump cares.) Less remarked on but perhaps more striking about Trump’s tariff plan was something else: its blithe confidence that the president can, if he wants, unilaterally raise prices for American consumers and businesses.

Though the fact is easy to forget, the Constitution does not give the president the power to impose tariffs or make trade policy more generally. Instead, it explicitly assigns responsibility over trade to Congress alone, awarding it the authority to set “duties” and “imposts” (taxes on foreign goods) and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” Yet when Trump talks about imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports, he’s not talking about getting Congress to do it—as we know from his record of issuing such orders, he means to do so himself.

[Peter Beinart: Will Trump start a trade war?]

How? Well, as with several other aspects of government, Congress has effectively outsourced its trade-policy power to the White House in a series of laws over the past 60 years, while putting in place few guardrails or limits on the president’s authority.

Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, for instance, lets the president impose tariffs as high as he wants on specific industries, as long as the Department of Commerce determines that imports in those industries pose a threat to “national security” (a term the law does not define). Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 lets the president, through the U.S. trade representative, take action against any “act, policy, or practice” of a foreign country that’s “unreasonable or discriminatory” (whatever that means). And the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 invests the president with the power to impose tariffs during a “national emergency” (which the president can declare at will).

The vague, ill-defined language in these laws gives the president enormous latitude to do pretty much what he wants, particularly because the courts tend to be deferential to presidential judgments about what constitutes a national-security threat or whether a foreign country’s policy is “unreasonable.” For the most part, past presidents have nonetheless been cautious about exercising unilateral trade authority under these laws. Prior to Trump, the “national security” exception had been invoked only to embargo oil imports from Iran and Libya. And although Section 301 has been cited more, since the mid-1990s it has typically been used to initiate or implement WTO settlements.

Trump, as was his wont, ignored these norms and took full advantage of the loopholes Congress left for him. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, he issued 41 executive orders on trade, compared with an average of 19 during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies. In 2018, Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum on the grounds that the imports threatened national security, even though the Department of Defense has noted that only about 3 percent of U.S. steel production goes toward national defense, and even though the countries Trump put tariffs on included close allies such as Canada and the European Union. A year later, he announced a plan to impose a new 5 percent tariff on all imports from Mexico unless the country “substantially” stopped the flow of undocumented migrants into the U.S.; he withdrew the threat only after Mexico agreed to send more troops to its border with Guatemala.

[Derek Thompson: Trade wars are not good, or easy to win]

Most dramatically, of course, Trump used Section 301—the unfair-trade-practices clause—to unilaterally impose 25 percent tariffs on roughly $250 billion in Chinese goods, and when China retaliated, he imposed a second round of tariffs that hit another $120 billion or so in Chinese imports. Trump’s tariffs were at best loosely connected to the unfair trade practices they were supposed to remedy—which included, most notably, China’s violation of intellectual-property rules—but the language in Section 301 is, again, vague enough that this didn’t matter.

Aside from whether Trump’s tariffs accomplished any of his supposed goals, evidence that they were good for the U.S. economy is hard to come by. No meaningful revival in manufacturing jobs occurred during his presidency. And the cost of his tariffs was borne, a 2020 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found, almost entirely by American businesses and consumers. According to an analysis by the research and consulting firm Trade Partnership Worldwide, after three years of his administration, the total cost of Trump’s tariffs to U.S. enterprise was $45 billion.

Even as Trump’s various trade wars raised prices for consumers, they were especially hard on American producers and workers, particularly in parts of the country that supported him. That’s because, as a 2020 study found, China targeted its retaliatory tariffs against pro-Trump areas. Farmers were hit by those, which by the end of Trump’s term covered 98 percent of U.S. agricultural exports. And American businesses reliant on equipment and other imports from China saw their costs rise and profit margins fall, while exporters in a wide range of industries saw sales fall, thanks to retaliatory moves by the EU and China.

The real problem with the tariffs, though, was not their macroeconomic impact. It’s the fact that they were imposed, in effect, at Trump’s whim. The rise of the “imperial presidency,” together with seemingly permanent deadlock in Congress, may have inured us to the unilateral exercise of presidential power, as more and more policy gets done by executive order rather than legislation. As a result, we’ve come to accept that a president can fight a war without Congress ever bothering to declare it, and can exercise near free rein over immigration policy without congressional authorization.

[Read: Globalization doesn’t make as much sense as it used to]

Arguably, such cases might call for a national-security exception. Yet no plausible justification exists for handing unilateral power over trade policy to the president. The imposition of tariffs is not something that demands immediate action—it can, and should, be done through the legislative process. And unlike the waging of war, in which case the Constitution does make the president the commander in chief of the military, tariffs are entirely Congress’s responsibility. It has simply abdicated that responsibility.

Typically, when you talk about policy problems in Washington, identifying what’s wrong is easy; what’s harder is finding a way to make it right. Where trade is concerned, however, the solution is easy: Congress can amend existing statutes and pass a new law to take away, or severely curtail, the president’s ability to impose tariffs. The simplest way to do this would be to set a time limit on any tariffs imposed by the president, a “sunset clause” that would require congressional approval for them to continue. In fact, Senator Mike Lee, a Republican representing Utah, offered a bill on the very first day of Trump’s presidency that would do precisely this.

Unfortunately, Lee’s bill went nowhere, and getting a similar law passed would be a major political challenge because skepticism about free trade is now common in Washington while protectionism is seen by many as a political winner. (The Biden administration has, in fact, kept Trump’s China tariffs in place.) But the issue isn’t really about whether to impose tariffs or not—after all, if Congress likes tariffs, it can enact them itself. The issue is power: the fact that the president can wake up one morning and decide he likes “10 percent for everybody”—and that changes what Americans pay for imported goods.

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For years, the American approach to protein has been a never-ending quest for more. On average, each person in the United States puts away roughly 300 pounds of meat a year; we are responsible for more than a third of the multibillion-dollar protein-supplement market. Our recommended dietary allowance, or RDA, for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day—a quota that a 160-pound person could meet with a couple of eggs in the morning and an eight-ounce steak at night. American adults consistently eat well above that amount, with men close to doubling it—and recent polls show that millions of us want to increase our intake.

The American appetite for protein is, simply put, huge. And still, Jose Antonio thinks we’re getting nowhere near enough.

The RDA of 0.8 grams per kilogram is “nothing, literally nothing,” Antonio, a health-and-human-performance researcher at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. “Most of my friends get that at breakfast.” In an ideal world, Antonio said, totally sedentary adults should consume at least twice that; people who seriously exercise should start with a minimum of 2.2 grams per kilogram, and ramp their levels up from there. (Antonio is also a co-founder of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, which has received sponsorships from companies that sell protein supplements.)

In Antonio’s pro-protein world, people would be fitter, more energetic, and suffer less chronic disease; they’d build muscle more efficiently, and recover faster from workouts. There is no definitive cap, in his view, on how much protein people should strive for. The limit, he said, is “How much can a human consume in a single day?”

Among nutritionists, Antonio’s viewpoint is pretty fringe. There is, other experts told me, such a thing as too much protein—or at least a point of rapidly diminishing returns. But researchers don’t agree on how much protein is necessary, or how much is excessive; they’ve reached no consensus on the extent of its benefits, or whether eating extra servings can send our health into decline. Which leaves Americans with no protein ceiling—and plenty of room for our protein hunger to grow, and grow, and grow.

[Read: You’re probably drinking enough water]

Not having enough protein is clearly very bad. Protein is essential to the architecture of our cells; we rely on it for immunity and hormone synthesis, and cobble it together to build muscles, skin, and bone. Among the three macronutrients—the other two being carbohydrates and fat—protein is the only one that “we need to get every day,” Joanne Slavin, a nutrition researcher at the University of Minnesota, told me. Nearly half of the 20 amino-acid building blocks that make up protein can’t be produced in-house. Go without them for too long, and the body will start to break its own tissues down to scavenge the molecules it needs.

That state of deficiency is exactly what the protein RDA was designed to avoid. Researchers decided the threshold decades ago, based on their best estimations of the amount of protein people needed to balance out their loss of nitrogen—a substance that’s in amino acids but that the body can’t itself make. The average person in the study, they found, needed 0.66 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight to avoid going into the red. So they set the guidelines at 0.8, a level that would keep the overwhelming majority of the population out of the deficiency zone. That number has stuck in the many years since, and Slavin, who has sat on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, sees no reason for it to change. People who are expending extra energy on growth, or whose muscles are taxed by exercise or aging, might need more. But for the typical American adult, Slavin said, “I think 0.8 is the right number.”

Others vehemently disagree. The current standard is “not enough to support everyday living,” Abbie Smith-Ryan, a sports-nutrition expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Adults, she and others told me, should be getting more like 1.2 or 1.6 grams per kilogram at baseline. Their beef with the RDA is twofold. For one, the original nitrogen analyses oversimplified how the body metabolizes and retains protein, Stuart Phillips, a protein researcher at McMaster University, in Canada, told me. And second, even if the 0.8 number does meet our barest needs, “there’s a much more optimal amount we should be consuming” that would further improve our health, Katie Hirsch, an exercise physiologist at the University of South Carolina, told me. (I reached out to the USDA, which helps develop the U.S.’s official Dietary Guidelines, about whether the RDA needed to change; a spokesperson referred me to the National Academy of Sciences, which said that the RDA was last reviewed in 2002, and was expected to be reviewed again soon.)

If Hirsch and others are right, even people who are slightly exceeding the government guideline might not be maximizing their resilience against infections, cardiovascular disease, metabolic issues, muscle loss, and more. People who are working out and still eating the measly 0.8 grams per kilogram per day, Antonio told me, are also starving themselves of the chance to build lean muscle—and of performance gains.

But the “more” mentality has a limit. Experts just can’t agree on what it is. It does depend on who’s asking, and their goals. For most people, the benefits “diminish greatly” past 1.6 grams per kilogram, Phillips told me. Smith-Ryan said that levels around 2.2 were valid for athletes trying to lose weight. Antonio is more liberal still. Intakes of 3.3 or so are fair game for body builders or elite cyclists, he told me. In one of his studies, he had athletes pack in 4.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight for weeks—a daily diet that, for a 160-pound person, would require three-plus pounds of steak, 16 cups of tofu, or 89 egg whites.

[Read: The Jordan Peterson all-meat diet]

That is … a lot of protein. And most of the other experts I spoke with said that they didn’t see the point, especially for Americans, who already eat more protein than people in most other countries. “There’s very little evidence that more is better,” Marion Nestle, a nutrition researcher at New York University, told me.

The worry isn’t necessarily that tons of protein would cause acute bodily harm, at least not to people who are otherwise in good health. Over the years, researchers have raised concerns that too much protein could damage the kidneys or liver, leach calcium from the bones, or even trigger cancer or early death—but the evidence on all fronts is, at best, mixed. In Antonio’s high-protein studies with athletes, he told me, their organs have remained in tip-top shape. The known drawbacks are more annoying than dangerous: High-protein diets can raise the risk of bloating, gas, and dehydration; burning through tons of protein can also make people feel very, very hot. Roughly a quarter of the participants in Antonio’s ultra-high-protein study dropped out: Many of them felt too full, he told me, and no longer enjoyed food. One volunteer was so plagued by night sweats by the close of the trial, he said, that she could no longer fall asleep.

Whether many years of an ultrahigh-protein lifestyle could be harmful is less clear. Native communities in the Arctic have healthfully subsisted on such diets for generations, but they’ve had a long time to adapt; those in Western society might not fare the same.

Over the years, it’s gotten easy to interpret protein’s apparent lack of immediate downsides as permission to reach for more. But for now, many experts would rather err on the side of moderation. “Would I feed that much to one of my relatives? I would not,” Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University, told me. Even if protein itself turns out not to be hard on the body, the foods it comes in still might be, including processed meats or sugary “high-protein” powders, shakes, cookies, chips, and bars. People pounding protein also risk squeezing other nutrients out of their diet, Roberts told me—whole grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables, all of them packed with fiber, a vital ingredient that nutritionists actually do agree we lack.

[Read: Selling the fantasy of high-protein everything]

Plus, Slavin argued, there’s a point at which excess protein becomes a straight-up waste. When people eat more than about 20 to 40 grams of protein in a single sitting, their protein-processing machinery can get overwhelmed; the body eliminates the nitrogen as waste, then treats the rest as it would a carbohydrate or fat. “You can get fat on proteins just like you can get fat on carbohydrates,” Slavin told me. Which makes overdoing protein, in her eyes, “expensive and stupid.”

The excess can have consequences beyond what our own bodies endure. Meat production drives greenhouse-gas emissions and uses up massive tracts of land. And Maya Almaraz, a food-systems researcher at Princeton, has found that the majority of the nitrogen pollution in wastewater is a by-product of our diets. The more protein we eat, the more we might be feeding toxic algal blooms.

There’s no denying that protein deficiency is a problem in many parts of the world, even within the United States. Protein sources are expensive, putting them out of reach of poor communities. Meanwhile, many of the people who worry most about getting enough of it—the wealthy, the ultra-athletic, the educated—are among those who need to supplement the least. Experts, for now, may not agree on how much protein is too much for individuals. But if appetite is all we have to curb our intake, going all in on protein might create problems bigger than anything we’ve had to stomach so far.

The vast artefact is being prepared for return from the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh to the Nisga'a Nation, an indigenous group based on the west coast of Canada, after it was 'stolen' nearly a century ago.