We take as an encouraging sign the reports out of Washington that the new Senate is preparing to move ahead with a bill that would set up a check and balance on the Obama administration’s nuclear negotiations with the Iranian regime. Reuters is quoting Senator Corker, the Tennessean who is now chairing the Foreign Relations Committee, as saying that he isn’t sure whether the measure has, as a result of the election, a veto-proof majority. All the greater the logic for testing that matter at the earliest opportunity.

Our own oft-stated view is that the appeasement is in the talking. It’s not only the outcome of the negotiation that represents the danger but the negotiations themselves. We learned that lesson at Munich. We learned it at Paris (there might still be a free Vietnam if we hadn’t entered those talks). We learned it at Oslo. But it’s hard to think of a clearer example of the inherent vice in this kind of negotiation than what is under way with the mullahs; the fear of Iran is so great that our president actually wants to exclude from the process any role for Congress.

Nor is this a simple right-wing-left wing thing. Or a Democratical or Republicanistic matter. The drive for an Iran sanctions bill has been from the start a partnership between a leading Democrat, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and a Republican, Mark Kirk of Illinois. The measure, which would return and maybe strengthen sanctions if the Iranians fail to abide by their commitments, has broad bi-partisan support. The logic is for it to be welcomed by President Obama and taken as support for a tough line in talks with the mullahs.

The president’s stated fear, that the Iranians will pull out of the talks if the measure passes, ought to tell him something. Why would the Iranians fear such a bill if they were participating in these negotiations in good faith? The best thing for the President would be to calm down. We remember when the Wall Street Journal was running its campaign against the strategic arms talks with the Soviet camarilla. And we were there, years later, when Secretary of State Kissinger got up at a banquet and expressed appreciation for the pressure under which the editor of the Journal, Robert Bartley, had put him.

If President Obama gets a condominium with Tehran without recourse to Congress, the best that it will be possible to say of it is that it will not be what the Constitution calls “the supreme law of the land.” To enter that exalted status a deal with Iran would have to be passed by both the House and Senate as a law or ratified by two-third of the Senate as a treaty. Fat chance. What Mr. Obama is hatching is a pact that could be abrogated by the next president, who is due to be sworn in two years and five days and will be able to do the deed with just a telephone or a pen.