Of all the elements to the controversy over the invitation of the Congress to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the one that strikes us as the most ridiculous is the notion that it violates either the letter or the spirit of the Constitution, or both. The idea seems to be that somehow foreign affairs is the purview of solely the President owing to the reception clause — giving him the duty to receive ambassadors and other public ministers.

How this got transmogrified into the notion that only the president has standing in foreign affairs would no doubt support a raft of PhD theses. But how about a plain reading of the founding parchment itself? The fact is that the grants to Congress in respect of foreign affairs are enormous, starting with the first of its enumerated powers — to lay and collect taxes and “duties,” the latter meaning important tariffs. The president may be assigned to negotiate them, but it’s Congress that lays them.

Then you have your second power — to borrow money on the credit of the United States. This is the debts we’ve racked up to Red China and the like. We’d love to be able to blame the President for this. But the enumerated power belongs to Congress. It is Congress that does the borrowing from foreign governments and foreign private lenders. Domestic ones, too, but this editorial is about the notion that Congress has no powers in international affairs.

Your third great power granted to Congress is via the so-called commerce clause. It grants to Congress — not to the president — the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations,” which is broad enough to encompass the establishment and disestablishment of trade and financial sanctions with Iran. That is precisely the business of Congress. It may be, again, that the president or state secretary can negotiate. But the actual power, this belongs to the Congress.

Feature now the fourth power — to establish an uniform rule of naturalization. Does this trans-configure into foreign affairs, or is it just a domestic question? Let’s skip that pettifogging and move on to the fifth paragraph of enumerated powers: coinage. It is one, even the primary, monetary power. Congress, it says, shall have the power to “coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin. . .” In other words, that power, too, is about, among other things, foreign affairs. It belongs to Congress.

Let us skip, for the moment, the powers to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting, establish post offices, and secure copyrights and patents, and constitute tribunals inferior to the supreme court. Let’s move on to the power to “define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the Law of Nations.” The editorial plenum of The New York Sun has convened on this question and concluded that it is foreign-affairs-ish.

Now we come to the big ones. It is expressly to Congress, not to the president, and the Constitution grants the most important power in foreign affairs — “to declare war.” In the next phrase, the Constitution also assigns to Congress the power to grant letters of marque and reprisal, classic war instruments empowering private parties to conduct war on behalf of the United States. Congress also gets to make rules in respect of “captures on land and water.”

And then: Congress has the power to “raise and support armies” and to “provide and maintain a Navy.” It — not the president — gets to “make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.” It gets to call forth the Militia not only to execute the laws of the Union and suppress insurrections but also to “repel invasions” — meaning from, like, foreigners. The Senate gets to ratify treaties and advise and consent on the naming of ambassadors.

Reviewing the list of enumerated powers, one discovers that for the authority to bring in Prime Minister Netanyahu — or any other foreign figure — Congress could turn to almost any one of its enumerated powers. Its authority is broad and deep. Plus: What is said on the floor of the Congress may not be questioned — meaning submitted to compulsory review — in any other place.

We’d love to see Mr. Netanyahu come back to the Congress for a third joint meeting, but that’s not our point here. Our point is merely to mark the standing of Congress. We’re old enough to remember when it was the conservatives who were arguing that Congress lacks for standing in foreign affairs. Ronald Reagan was president, and Congress was trying to stop him from fighting the communists at Nicaragua and blocking the Soviet Union in Central America. The fact is that the plain language of the Constitution gives the Congress plenty of powers on this head.