President Harding nominated Democrat Pierce Butler to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace William R. Day. Nominating a Democrat assured Harding that he could get his nomination past the then Democratic U.S. Senate.
Gee, it's almost like politics played a role in Supreme Court nominations back then. . .
While he was a Democrat, he was also a staunch conservative, this being a day when conservatives still existed in the Democratic Party. He was one of the justices that proved to be trouble for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.
Butler was also a devout Catholic. Today he's partially remembered for issuing the only dissenting opinion in Buck v. Bell, a case which permitted compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled and which is regarded now as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. Bell's dissent, was, interestingly, without a dissenting opinion, but it was a dissent. Oliver Wendell Holmes attributed his dissent to his Catholicism.
Butler also dissented from Olmstead v. United States, which upheld Federal wiretapping.
He died at age 73 in 1939.
Võ Văn Kiệt, a North Vietnamese Communist figure who later played a prominent role in opening the Vietnamese economy back up, and who served as the Prime Minister of the country in the 1990s, was born.
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