Teapot Dome and the Supreme Court Case That Gave Congressional Subpoenas Teeth

There is a rock formation in Natrona County, Wyoming, that looks a little like a teapot, if you squint and want it to. Under it, and under a stretch of the Elk Hills in California, sat oil that the United States had set aside for the Navy back when the fleet was switching from coal to oil. In 1921 those reserves were quietly moved from the Navy's control to the Interior Department, run by a former New Mexico senator named Albert Fall. Within months Fall had leased them, without competitive bidding, to two oilmen: Harry Sinclair got Teapot Dome, and Edward Doheny got Elk Hills. Nobody in Washington announced much. What brought it all out was a Senate committee that kept asking questions, and what made those questions impossible to ignore was a second scandal, a stubborn witness from small-town Ohio and a Supreme Court decision that most Americans have never heard of.

In short: The Teapot Dome investigation showed what a determined Senate committee could uncover about public resources handed to private oil companies. A related inquiry into the Justice Department produced McGrain v. Daugherty in 1927, the ruling that Congress has the power to compel testimony as part of making laws. That power is the backbone of congressional oversight, and it is about to matter again.

A quiet lease and a ranch that suddenly looked richer

The leases themselves were not secret forever. Word of them leaked in 1922, and the Senate asked the Interior Department for an explanation. Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, the progressive Republican who had spent his career fighting railroad and corporate power, pushed for an inquiry, and the Senate Committee on Public Lands took it up. The investigation that mattered was led by Thomas Walsh, a Democrat from Montana, a careful lawyer who read documents the way other senators read newspapers.

Walsh spent more than a year working through the paperwork before public hearings opened in late 1923. The early sessions were dull, which is often how real investigations begin. The breakthrough came from an unlikely direction: people in New Mexico noticed that Fall, who had been short of money, was suddenly improving his ranch, paying back taxes and buying land. Where had the money come from?

The answers came in stages, and each one was worse than the last. Doheny eventually admitted that he had sent Fall $100,000 in cash, which he described as a loan between old friends. The money had been carried to Fall by Doheny's son in a satchel. Sinclair's companies had also moved money and Liberty Bonds toward Fall through intermediaries. Fall, by then out of office, was not a figure of mystery anymore. He was a Cabinet secretary who had leased public oil to men who had paid him.

The outcome in the courts was uneven, and the unevenness is part of the lesson. Fall was convicted in 1929 of accepting a bribe and became the first Cabinet member sent to prison for crimes committed in office. Doheny, the man who handed over the money, was acquitted of giving the bribe the next year. Sinclair was acquitted of conspiracy but went to jail on two other counts: contempt of the Senate for refusing to answer the committee's questions, and contempt of court after his people were caught having jurors followed. The Navy got its oil reserves back after the courts canceled the leases.

The second scandal, and the brother who would not come

Teapot Dome was not the only mess left behind when President Warren Harding died in August 1923. His attorney general, Harry Daugherty, had come with him from Ohio and was surrounded by stories of favours, fixers and prosecutions that never happened. Some critics asked a pointed question: why had the Justice Department been so slow to go after the oil leases and other frauds?

In 1924 the Senate set up a special committee to investigate the Justice Department. The driving force was Burton Wheeler, the other senator from Montana, newly elected and unafraid of making enemies. The hearings were lively and damaging. Daugherty resigned in March 1924 at the request of President Calvin Coolidge.

Wheeler soon found himself indicted in Montana on charges related to his law practice, and many people at the time saw the case as payback. He was acquitted. It is a small detail, but it shows the stakes: investigating the people who control prosecutors can be risky.

The committee wanted bank records and testimony from Mally Daugherty, the former attorney general's brother, who ran a bank in Washington Court House, Ohio. Investigators suspected that the bank's records would show where money connected to the attorney general had gone. The committee issued a subpoena. Mally Daugherty did not show up. The Senate then did something it rarely does now: it issued a warrant, and its deputy sergeant at arms, John McGrain, went to Ohio and took Daugherty into custody.

Daugherty's lawyers went to federal court and asked for a writ of habeas corpus, the old remedy for anyone held unlawfully. A federal district judge agreed with Daugherty and freed him. The judge's reasoning was blunt: the Senate was really trying to put the former attorney general on trial, which is a job for courts, and it had no power to make a private citizen answer its questions for that purpose. The Senate appealed, and the case reached the Supreme Court as McGrain v. Daugherty.

What the Court said in 1927

The Supreme Court decided the case in January 1927, and the vote was not close. Justice Willis Van Devanter wrote for the Court. He was no progressive; he was one of the conservative justices who would later fight much of the New Deal. That matters, because his opinion was about institutions, not ideology.

The core holding is simple to state. The power to investigate, backed by the power to compel testimony, is a necessary part of the power to legislate. Congress cannot write good laws about the Justice Department, or anything else, if it has no way to find out what is going on. The Constitution does not spell out a power to subpoena, but the Court found it implied in Article I, rooted in centuries of practice in the British Parliament and the American colonial and state legislatures.

The Court also dealt with the district judge's worry. It said a court should presume that the Senate was investigating for a legitimate legislative purpose, since the subject, the administration of the Justice Department, was plainly something Congress could legislate about. It did not matter that the inquiry might expose wrongdoing by a particular person. Exposure was often a side effect of finding the facts.

There were limits in the opinion, and later cases added more. A witness can still refuse to answer questions that have nothing to do with a legitimate subject of legislation, and the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination still applies. But the basic principle was settled: when Congress asks, people generally have to answer.

Two years later, in Sinclair v. United States, the Court upheld the oilman's conviction for refusing to answer the Teapot Dome committee's questions. Sinclair had argued that the Senate was really just helping a pending lawsuit. The Court said that did not excuse him. Congress could keep investigating public lands even while courts handled the cases.

Why the earlier rule had been so weak

To see why this ruling felt like a turning point, go back a few decades to Kilbourn v. Thompson, an 1881 decision. The House had jailed a witness named Hallet Kilbourn for refusing to answer questions about a bankrupt firm in which the federal government had an interest. The Supreme Court said the House had gone too far, because the inquiry was really into private business and a matter for the courts.

Kilbourn left many lawyers believing that congressional investigations were fragile things that a determined witness could defy. McGrain did not overrule Kilbourn outright, but it shifted the default. After 1927, the burden was on the witness to show that an inquiry had no legitimate legislative purpose, not on Congress to prove that it did.

Later decisions trimmed the power in some directions. In Watkins v. United States, decided in 1957 during the anti-communist hearings, the Court said Congress has no general power to expose for the sake of exposure and that witnesses are entitled to know how a question relates to the subject under inquiry. In Trump v. Mazars, decided in 2020, the Court set out special considerations for subpoenas seeking a president's personal records. But none of these cases undid the basic rule from McGrain.

The fair objection, and an answer

Here is the strongest case against a powerful congressional subpoena, and it deserves a hearing. Investigations can turn into theatre. A majority can use hearings to embarrass opponents, drag private citizens into the spotlight and win headlines rather than write laws. The anti-communist hearings of the late 1940s and 1950s ruined careers, and many of the people called to testify had committed no crime. The Watkins decision was a direct response to that era. A progressive who wants strong oversight of the powerful should also want protections for individuals.

That objection is right as far as it goes. The answer is not to weaken the power to investigate but to use it for its proper purpose and to respect the limits courts have drawn. The Teapot Dome inquiry is a good model. It followed documents. It took its time. It was about public property, the Navy's oil, being handed to private companies by an official who had been paid. That is exactly the kind of question a legislature exists to answer, because the solution was legislation and stronger rules about how public resources are leased.

There is a further point, which I think is the heart of the case. Without the power to compel testimony, the only people who would ever have to explain themselves to Congress would be the ones who wanted to. The officials and companies with the most to hide would simply decline. Oversight that depends on the goodwill of the people being overseen is not oversight.

Oil, public land and the long memory of a scandal

It is no accident that the most famous corruption scandal of the 1920s was about oil on public land. Then as now, the federal government controls huge reserves of oil, gas and coal, and decides who can extract them, on what terms and at what price. The temptation to give friends a good deal is permanent.

Teapot Dome left behind a phrase that Americans used for decades as shorthand for government corruption. It also left practical changes. In the wake of the scandal Congress gave its tax-writing committees the authority to obtain tax returns, a power that would figure in later fights over presidential records. And it fixed in law and politics the idea that public resources should be leased in the open, with competition, and that Congress has the right to look at how it is done.

Today, decisions about drilling and mining leases on federal lands and offshore waters are some of the most consequential climate choices the government makes. Leases signed now can lock in production for decades. Those decisions are made by agencies, and agencies answer to Congress. The investigators who sat through those dull early hearings in 1923 were doing the same job that congressional committees can do now: asking who got what, at what price, and why.

A tool returning to new hands

Democrats won control of the House and the Senate on November 3, 2026, and the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. Whatever else that majority does, it will hold the gavels of committees that can issue subpoenas. That power comes straight down from Walsh, Wheeler and a Supreme Court that decided, in the case of a reluctant bank president, that Congress was entitled to answers.

How that power is used will matter as much as whether it is used. The lesson of the 1920s is that patient, document-driven investigations about public money and public property build lasting change. The lesson of the 1950s is that investigations aimed at people rather than problems leave damage behind. Readers who care about accountability should hold the new majority to the first standard.

The people who pay when officials trade public resources for private favours are rarely in the hearing room. They are taxpayers, sailors who needed fuel, communities near drilling sites and future generations living with the climate that today's leases help create. Oversight is how their interests get a seat at the table.

What you can do

• Know who holds the gavel for you. Use our representative lookup to find your U.S. representative and senators, their phone numbers and contact forms, and their latest votes. Ask them which committees they sit on and what they plan to investigate.
• Follow the oversight fights in Congress. Our coverage of democracy and the rule of law tracks subpoenas, contempt votes and the court cases that decide how far investigations can go.
• Watch the courts that set the limits. The court watch page lists the Supreme Court's opinions this term with the Court's own summaries, plus its emergency docket.
• Keep an eye on public oil and gas. Follow big oil and fossil fuels for leasing decisions on federal land and water, and comment on federal rules through our open comments page, which lists rules closing soonest first with advice on how to write a comment.

The Teapot Dome investigators did not have a dramatic confession to start with. They had leases, receipts and a ranch that looked too prosperous. Persistence, and a power to ask that the courts later confirmed, did the rest.