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I'm asking you! I sincerely don't have a strong understanding of the operation of the law in this respect and am trying to get my head around it. Have I understood you correctly?
Definitely not legal as pseudonymous pieces; coordinated works are required to disclose, even in newspapers. I'm moderately confident the law would trigger certain reporting requirements in New York, and probably those would be mandated by federal law for Hamilton, possibly some other writers. Not sure on the journals themselves; we have mixed information on what extent they were bonafide publishers or party outfits.
... by the text of the statutes. The First Amendment raises an absolute ton of legal questions, here, and the question of whether these disclosure, reporting, and 'stand by' requirements are legal gets complicated (albeit generally expressive association, rather than free speech). Many rules have been invalidated by SCOTUS jurisprudence as overly broad, ill-defined, or improperly tailored for how large of a chilling effect on free speech they have. And there is specific precedence on reporting requirements having massive chilling effects.
Ok. So is it your position then that by the text of the statutes, when the NYT publishes an anonymous article saying "I am part of the resistance inside the Trump White House", that article would be illegal? But no one prosecutes it because it would so obviously infringe on free speech?
Possibly. The NYT specifically is a lot more likely to be a bonafide publisher by FEC regs compared to the various Federalist-era papers, and some of the electioneering requirements only apply to 'broadcast' communications, but the disclosure requirements in the statutes did not have such exceptions.
See Buckley v. Valeo. It's a bit of a dogs breakfast of a decision with a ton of balancing tests, or where the government conceded a much more restricted version of the statute on, but on the specific matter a section of the law which mandated disclosure of independent contributions :
Note that these restricted definitions, unlike many other components, were not conceded by the state at previous court hearings, but the result of SCOTUS trimming down the statute to avoid declaring the whole thing unconstitutional.
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