Congressional crisis? Who knows?
Subpoena crisis? We certainly have one of those.
But, there’s a way forward; all Congress needs to do is pick up the Supreme Court’s lead, open its map and take it.
If you blow the dust off on your high school history, you’ll recall the Teapot Dome scandal that engulfed the Warren G. Harding administration in the 1920s, a tale of open corruption, oil, murder-suicide and massive amounts of cash … even cows.
The nickel tour through Teapot Dome is that Harding’s Interior Secretary, an ambitious fellow named Albert Fall, took bribes from oil companies in exchange for some of the richest oil land then in federal hands. He then quietly passed the Teapot Dome drilling rights to a cranky oil baron named Harry Sinclair, the head of the Mammoth Oil Company. Fall also leased the drilling rights to a pair of California oil fields to his old pal Edward Doheny, a fabulously wealthy oilman whosomehow escaped prison for the bribes he paid to Fall.
At the end of it all, Teapot Dome passed into infamy as the first time a U.S. cabinet official … Albert Fall … went to jail for a felony he perpetrated while he was in office.
Teapot Dome plunged its rotten roots into U.S. soil in 1922. That was the same year that saw the birth of Nellie Bly, Stan Lee, Judy Garland and George McGovern. It was also the height of Prohibition, the same year that California grizzlies became extinct and a 20-ton meteorite nearly wiped out the town of Blackstone, Virginia.
Teapot Dome percolated along in the early months of 1922, but the stench of filthy, oil-stained money eventually reached Washington, albeit a little circuitously.
By April 1922, some Wyoming oilmen spurned in Fall and Harding’s shady deal noticed that Sinclair’s trucks were hauling drilling equipment to Teapot Dome. The Wall Street Journal eventually caught the scent and exposed the whole lousy deal in that same April when the Wyoming gang noticed trucks with the Sinclair logo hauling oilfield equipment up to Teapot Dome. The Wall Street Journal broke the news about the deal in an April 14, 1922, article.
Congress jumped in the day after the WSJ article appeared when Wyoming Democratic Senator John Kendrick tossed out a resolution to open an investigation into the thing.
And here’s where we reach 2019.
At the height of the Senate investigation into Teapot Dome, some of the dirty deeds gang tried to stonewall congressional investigations. Oil baron Sinclair tried it, refusing to answer questions from senators. His claim ... and here's the echo ... was that Congress had no right to delve into his private affairs.
It took until 1929 for the Supreme Court to rule in Sinclair v. United States, but rule it did, telling Harry Sinclair that, despite the bricks he’d piled up against scrutiny, Congress most certainly does possess the power to investigate cases in which the country’s laws may have been violated. Harry eventually spent six months in prison. Fall went to prison for a year while Daugherty escaped punishment for any part of Teapot Dome.
Even more on point for today’s troubles, the court had ruled two years before the Sinclair case in McGrain v. Daugherty that Congress does have the power to compel testimony from significant witnesses. To prove it, Congress sent a deputized sergeant-at-arms to Cincinnati to arrest the attorney general's brother, who had failed to answer its Teapot Dome subpoena and had generally thumbed his nose at congressional authority.
Congress and particularly the House isn’t compelled to invent new tools to force testimony from its subpoena targets; Sinclair and McGrain has both already filled up the toolbox. All the heads of committees investigating Trump’s serial perfidy need to do is open up the box, take out the tools and set about its work.