“The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which contain its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.”

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That founding wisdom, from Alexander Hamilton writing in 75 Federalist, is being quoted today by the Weekly Standard in an editorial urging Congress to block the Obama administration’s proposed agreement with the Iranian regime. It’s a marvelous quote that reminds us of the worldview of the Founders. They were wary of human nature, of the propensity of kings and the susceptibility to hubris. Hence their system of checks and balances.

President Obama’s proposed pact with the Iranians certainly puts us in a checks and balances moment. No doubt the president is going to try to buffalo the press with the notion that it is somehow out of line for Congress to assert its authority against the proposed appeasement. He’s going to try to shift the burden of this debate onto the senators and congressmen. But we have all sorts of precedent to counter such nonsense.

It happens that your editor is a veteran — albeit in a minor way — of the Wall Street Journal’s campaign against SALT II. That was the strategic arms limitation treaty signed in June 1979 by President Carter and the Soviet party boss, Leonid Brezhnev, at Vienna. The Austrian capital was the summit at which the American president leaned and kissed the Soviet dictator, a moment that helped doom the Carter presidency.

Much to the consternation of the arms control enthusiasts, the Senate made it clear it would not ratify SALT II, and the pact never became the supreme law of the land. Despite this — or in part because of it, we’d argue — America won the Cold War. We take that as a reminder that the importance of treaties is magnified by what might be called a diplomatic Doppler effect. Yet they are rarely dispositive. They are trumped by facts, interests, and democracy.

The place for these to be marshaled against the Iran appeasement is in the Congress. There will have to be hearings, we’d think. How they’ll be set up isn’t yet clear. Foreign Relations (chaired by Senator Corker) has standing, as does Armed Services (Senator McCain), and Commerce (Senator Thune). Commerce is engaged because this is a proposal for lifting sanctions. We favor full engagement, on all these fronts, against this deal.

We hope for hearings that are broad and deep. Certainly they will look at the terms of the pact, the centrifuges, the verification schemes, the sunsetting, etc. etc. Let the Congress, too, take a look at the internal reasoning: Why was Israel excluded? Why was it the P5+1 (America, Britain, France, Communist China, Russia, and, of all countries, Germany) and not the P5+2, so that Israel could be included? Why should we treat with an Iran that won’t treat with Israel?

Let Congress dig in on these questions and use its subpoena power if it cannot get voluntary answers. One Iranian general declared the other day that the destruction of Israel was “non-negotiable.” The Congress deserves answers from the administration on what it makes of all that? The deal disclosed so far looks bad enough, but what, if any, secret side deals are lurking beside the Iran pact?

This is a time to remember the first of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.” For our part, we have no confidence that this agreement can meet that or any of the above tests. We never should have begun this parley and the place to end it is in the Congress, just as Hamilton foresaw.