The Senate is no longer a deliberative body. It's a decorating committee.

As the Iran war enters its twelfth week and inflation hits new highs, the Senate is locked in a bitter parliamentary fight over how to fund Trump's ballroom.

This week, the U.S. Senate will stage an argument so absurd it will be talked about for a thousand years.

There’s a story that the ancient historian Tacitus tells (half in disgust, half in awe) of how the Roman emperor, Nero, toured the rubble of his capital after a great fire swept Rome. Many thousands were without homes, and his own palace was burned. Nero shifted into “emergency response mode,” in a sense. As his people suffered and struggled to rebuild, he hastily drew up plans to build a new palace. For himself. And he increased taxes to make it happen.

I was thinking about that palace, the Domus Aurea or “Golden House,” this past weekend when I read the latest news about Trump’s ballroom. Of course, the current U.S. president has been compared too many times to cite to Nero. But now, it seems, the Senate has subordinated itself to Trump’s desires, as Republicans fight mightily to make sure the president gets his palace.

The U.S. Senate has been setting aside valuable time to bicker over the finer details of funding for Donald Trump’s ballroom. Not the ongoing war in Iran or a teetering economy, mind you, but the ballroom.

Let me walk you through what your senators have actually been doing with the time you pay them to spend, wandering their own marbled hallways carrying out the “people’s business.”

On Friday, the parliamentarian’s office, presided over by Elizabeth MacDonough, began hearing arguments from Republican and Democratic aides over whether hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding for Donald Trump’s 90,000-square-foot East Wing ballroom could be jammed through the budget reconciliation process. As The Hill reported, the dispute turned on what’s called the “Byrd Rule,” a parliamentary instrument designed in 1985 to prevent the Senate from smuggling unrelated policy into budget bills. Hours of senior staff time were spent on the question of whether Trump’s chandeliers qualified as a “budgetary” matter.

Meanwhile… gasoline prices in California crossed six dollars a gallon, with other states not far behind. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also released a red-alert inflation report, showing the largest annual increase in three years.

But in the U.S. Senate, Republicans were preparing for a fight. On Saturday, the Senate parliamentarian dealt the GOP its big blow. She determined that the ballroom money did, indeed, violate the Byrd Rule and could not pass with a simple majority. Senate Republicans lashed out, with Majority Leader John Thune’s team insisting they would “redraft,” “refine,” and “resubmit” until they got the money approved. Even budget hawk Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana proposed an amendment to offset the ballroom’s cost by trimming federal funds from other priorities to make sure President Trump could get what he wanted.

Meanwhile… the president threatened over the weekend that the “clock is ticking” in Iran, pledging harsher strikes as negotiations over its nuclear program have stalled. Economists have warned of economic catastrophe if the war drags into June, with the worst inflation increases yet to come.

But in the U.S. Senate, Republican leaders were focused on what mattered. On Sunday, they began gearing up to take the ballroom fight to the Senate Floor. Democrats planned to pressure them into a “vote-a-rama” session this week to vote — on the record — to keep the funding intact. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s top Senate allies, has stood by the president’s request as a “national security” matter, noting that the president constantly talks with the South Carolina senator about how important the ballroom is to him and the country.

Meanwhile… according to the Associated Press, the Trump administration began advancing preparations that might allow for the invasion of Cuba, including an indictment of the island’s leader, while the president suggested an aircraft carrier returning from the Iran theater could “stop about 100 yards offshore” of Cuba, hinting at coming action.

But in the U.S. Senate, GOP leaders this morning are busy considering whether to scrub the phrase “East Wing Modernization” from the legislative text entirely — to make the ballroom money look more like generic Secret Service funding. But there’s a complication. White House lawyers (who are currently defending the project in federal court against a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation), need Congress to explicitly authorize the ballroom so they can argue in court that the legislative branch has blessed it.

So Republicans enter this week facing a truly monumental dilemma: what to name the ballroom money they give to Trump. And they are gearing up for a fight with Democrats so they can show the president they will stand by him, no matter what.

You can see where I’m going with this.

It was bad enough that the Commander in Chief, during the bombing of another country, couldn’t seem to stop himself from drifting in press conferences to the question of drapes and what they’d look like in his new ballroom. It was bad enough that he carried the renderings to the back of Air Force One, on the return flight from West Palm Beach, and pulled them out like a child showing a fort to a parent, while reporters who had come prepared with questions about Tehran instead found themselves staring at architectural elevations of bulletproof glass and drone-proof ceilings. But at least that was just one deranged man, distracting only one branch of government.

Now, a second branch of the U.S. government — the most powerful country on earth — has redirected its focus to a ballroom, too. Senators are spending their evenings reading position papers on marble dance floors on the White House grounds. Senate parliamentarians are adjudicating whether golden chandeliers are eligible for an annual budget vote. And Senate aides are drafting and re-drafting legislative text in a desperate effort to make it all possible. Even the Secret Service Director has been hauled up to Capitol Hill to persuade any holdouts of how “important” this is.

English historian Edward Gibbon, surveying centering of Roman decline, identified the moment of the collapse. He pegged it at the point when leaders shifted from focusing on urgent civic matters to debating pomp and spectacle. Yes, the Roman Senate still met, he wrote, but its senators had quietly accepted that the work of their great empire was now the curation of the emperor’s taste. The state still seemed to function (bread was still distributed and the aqueducts still flowed), but underneath the surface the institutions were corroding.

About a hundred years after Nero was gone, a more noble statesman led the Roman Empire. Marcus Aurelius was known as the last “good emperor” and was clearly affected by the corruption of his predecessors. He probably had the gold palace in his head, the Domus Aurea, whenever he wrote about the importance of “ta koina,” or “the common things,” i.e. the things that belong to all. The state was a common thing, in his view, and it was his job to tend to protect it. So was citizenship and public spaces and nature itself. If these things were corrupted, Rome would be no more.

The ballroom is not a “common thing.” The ballroom is the president’s thing. It’s meant for him and his legacy. It’s also the donors’ thing, a way for big businesses and wealthy individuals to give money in search of special treatment from the Trump administration. And perhaps more than anything, it’s the sycophant’s thing. It’s the vanity project most cherished by the president and, accordingly, the one his staunchest defenders must take up as their own cause if they want to remain in his favor. In choosing to spend the third month of a war debating ballroom construction details, that’s how the U.S. Senate has told us what kind of body it’s become.

The ballroom is the perfect symbol — not just for the midterm elections but for this moment in American life — because the ballroom is an open confession of the powerful to the masses. It tells us, in hand-picked marble and bulletproof glass, what our government has been doing while we’re paying six dollars a gallon to drive our kid to school or to a grocery where we’ll fret about tradeoffs. It tells us what they think is important and what they’re willing to fight for, and incidentally, it also tells us who they’re willing to fight for.

This week, the U.S. Senate might complete a story that will be spoken of for a thousand years or more.

You see, Rome didn’t fall because Nero designed a Golden House for himself while his city was literally burning. The truth of the matter is that Rome fell because the Roman Senate let him do it, helped him, and then forgot that there’d ever been anything else worth doing than pleasing the emperor. The collapse came later, as it always does. In the meantime, the chandeliers were hung with pride.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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