Vice President Biden’s hotel bill in Paris — the Drudge Report headlines it at $585,000.50 for a night at the Intercontinental, not including the ride in from the airport — is prompting the futureofcapitalism.com to wonder why Amtrak’s most famous passenger failed to stay at the sprawling palace that serves as the residence of the American ambassador in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. A good question, to which we’d add our own: What was Mr. Biden, whose only constitutional duty is to serve in the Senate as its president, doing in Paris in the first place?

We understand this can be seen as an abstruse point, but it is one that rankles us in this era when President Obama is cutting out White House tours for school children so as to save a few tens of thousands of dollars for the sequester. It turns out that the taxpayers could save a fortune were the vice presidency reformed in keeping with the original, and constitutional, construction. The vice president is not part of the executive branch, was not supposed to be, has an enumerated assignment only of presiding over the Senate and counting the electoral vote. Instead the vice presidency has become a parody of government run amok.

In the same season that the White House tours for school children were sequestered, the White House Web site launched a series of audio and photo reports called “Being Biden.” The series “will combine a photo that offers a glimpse into the Vice Presidency with an audio recording of the Vice President narrating the moment and its significance. He will tell the story behind the story – of where he was when the photo was snapped, why it matters to him, and how the experience fits into the broader narrative of this Administration. . . . In other words, he’ll explain what it’s like ‘Being Biden.’”

How about a series on “being frugal”? The question of the vice president bothered the Founders something fierce. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts was against having a vice president of all. “We might as well put the President himself at the head of the Legislature,” he carped, though, as the editor of the Sun pointed out in a column in the American Spectator, Gerry was not so particular about it that he himself turned down the chance to serve as vice president (he was the fifth).

Another of the Founders, George Mason, feared the vice president would prove “an encroachment on the rights of the Senate,” according to notes made at the Constitutional Convention by James Madison. He records that Roger Sherman of Connecticut defended the idea of putting the vice president at the head of the upper chamber. Otherwise, Madison quotes Sherman as saying, “he would be without employment.” In other words, from the start the best defense that the vice presidency got is that it was make-work.

Time magazine once published a list of the worst vice presidents in history. It included Aaron Burr, who was a masterful president of the Senate and broke three whole ties but who, for slaying Alexander Hamilton in a duel, became the only vice president to be, while in office, charged with murder, though he was never tried (and we’d have voted to acquit). Lincoln’s first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, carried on incessantly about how useless the vice presidency was, called it a “nullity,” and likened it to the “fifth wheel of a coach.” He did, while vice president, serve as a cook in the Coast Guard. We have a feeling that the taxpayers could save a fortune by digging into how we got from there to the vice president riding around spending $500,000 on hotel rooms at Paris.