The U.S. Supreme Court has thrown out a particularly mean device intended to promote term limits for members of Congress. U.S. District Judge Morton Brody threw out a similar Maine law four years ago. Now the highest court, acting on a Missouri case involving an amendment to the state constitution, has put the final nail in the coffin.

Advocates of term limits promoted the device under the deceptively bland name “voter information laws.” Those laws publicly labeled any candidate who refused to pledge support for a term-limits amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Candidates who refused would have the notation “Refused to pledge to support term limits” printed opposite their names on the election ballot.

The Maine law was approved by 59 percent of the voters in 1996. But the League of Women Voters successfully challenged it, calling in the “Scarlet Letter law.” The statute never took effect. Judge Brody acted before the next election, saying the law was “intentionally intimidating” and “effectively targeted to persuade voters that all candidates so labeled are unworthy of public office.” The U.S. Court of Appeals rejected an appeal.

In the Missouri case, Justice John Paul Stevens, speaking for the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court, noted that other federal courts had denounced such laws as “pejorative,” “negative,” “derogatory,” “intentionally intimidating,” “particularly harmful” and “politically damaging.” He found that such adverse labels handicap candidates “at the most crucial stage in the election process – the instant before the vote is cast.” Far from regulating the procedural mechanism of elections, Justice Stevens wrote, the Missouri provision attempted to “dictate electoral outcomes.”

So much for the Scarlet Letter laws and amendments still on the books in a number of states. They are unconstitutional. The national term-limits lobby, which calls itself U.S. Term Limits, will have to look elsewhere in its effort to override the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1995 decision finding that states’ limits on congressional terms of office are unconstitutional.

In contrast with the high court’s action, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court has upheld the Maine term-limits law, which applies only to state offices. That decision is final, not subject to review by the U.S. Supreme Court. So the Maine term-limits law is here to stay unless the Legislature repeals it or voters change their minds on the issue.