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(Ignoring for the sake of argument that I live under a very different legal regime)
It would certainly be an imposition, but it would not be an imposition on my speech rights. I would find it very annoying to have to constantly detail where I bought lunch, but doing so would not in any sense present a first amendment issue. It would be bad policy, but I fail to see how such a law would be unconstitutional.
After all, while the government doesn't require you to report all your expenditures it does require you to report your income. This is accepted as normal and uncontroversial - as are expenditure reporting requirements for political candidates.
My understanding is that if there is no coordination with the candidate there is no reporting requirement. You can spend a billion dollars on "vote Trump" ads and as long as you don't communicate with the Trump campaign there's no obligation to disclose anything.
I think that's a reporting requirement. I haven't gone into any case law, but a plain reading of the legislation would seem to indicate that any expenditure made for the purpose of influencing the election is a campaign expenditure.
Neither. Not a reporting requirement, not a crime.
I think this just is one of those where you are not well-versed with a very different legal regime than your own. I notice that you avoided talking about McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n. Do you have any comment on that case or how it could play in to a hypothetical future case that directly addresses reporting requirements?
Express advocacy has reporting requirements.
What's the difference? You just said "any" expenditure made for the purpose of influencing the election is a campaign expenditure. So, shouldn't the latter be one, too?
Let me one more hypo you. One that I would be very unsurprised if it literally actually came up in arguments if we had a SCOTUS case directly on the reporting requirements. Would the pseudonymous Federalist Papers have been legal? They were all essentially politicians of various sorts and were surely running for elections at various times. The papers, themselves, were certainly aimed at influencing voting, and they could very plausibly think that it would influence things in ways that would get them elected (as they were, indeed, elected to various positions). Pseudonymous? Or reporting requirement? Criminal?
I want to repeat that very last thing. Is it criminal to not report it? Because I believe NY law was requiring a crime, not a civil infraction that merely incurs a fee.
I haven't read that case and I don't intend to.
So it does. TIL.
Implicitly I meant "any expenditure by the candidate or people coordinating with the candidate". The distinction I was drawing was that I believed unconnected individuals did not face reporting requirements. You've now alerted me that this is not precisely the case, so I amend my answer: Not a reporting requirement nor a crime, because a "Blue Lives Matter" sign does not constitute "express advocacy".
I'm not sure I understand the question? Why would they be impacted by campaign finance laws at all?
While FECA is best-known for its direct contribution limits on candidate-specific communications, much of the point of McCain-Feingold in 2002 was to expand the law's definition of 'electioneering communications' to cover matters that did not target or support a specific politician directly, but also matters like 'issue ads', which focused on topic areas, if usually to highlight a candidate on those matters. In addition to restrictions on when they could run them and how they could fund them, candidates running issues ads (or coordinating with those running issue ads) were required to disclose their participation, known as the "Stand By Your Ad" provision.
This was mostly used where the third-party issue ads explicitly named politicians (such as Citizens United involving a movie about Clinton's history), but the law held a candidate was clearly identified a "specific candidate" where a communication asked to call their representative, even if this resulted in many different 'specific' candidates being involved. And while the Federalist Papers genuinely were more focused on the theoretical foundations, their calls to action and some of the more subtle components would pass this requirement.
The larger length of time between the issuance of the Federalist Papers and the local elections for the convention might have put it outside of the FECA safe harbor timeline, but I'm honestly not sure, and the Stand By Your Ad requirement probably would have applied by its strict text. (In practice, the FEC tends to avoid cases with that clear a First Amendment component, lest they get slapped by SCOTUS again.) And most FECA provisions have a 50k audience requirement and only covered audio and video, which obviously would have been hard to hit in the Founding era.
And, of course, New York law can be much more aggressive than federal law : a New York organization opposing or supporting even specific ballot issues, separate from any specific candidate, must register with the state, report to the state any donations above a certain (low) threshold, and refuse any anonymous contributions. The Federalist Papers would clearly hit that requirement by strict read of the text, though there's both official and unofficial exceptions for organizations whose free speech the ACLU cares about. I think the Federalist Papers could also hit the PAC requirements by a strict read of the text, but I'd have to look through that in more detail to say for sure.
I'm still not really getting it. I was under the impression that the Federalist papers were a series of essays published in newspapers. As far as I know, they weren't ads. Why would they be governed by the rules that apply to modern ads and not the rules that apply to modern newspaper editorials?
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McCain-Feingold's (and I think NY law) definitions of electioneering communications are not limited to advertisements. Famously so, given that Citizens United revolved around a case where the FEC both prohibited ads for a movie and simply showing that movie.
There are exceptions for contributions (ie costs) by independent news media reporting bonafide news, but the "stand by your ad" rules, reporting provisions, and time provisions do not have such exceptions, and some of the Federalist newspapers probably would fail the modern independence test (if only because almost all newspapers at the Founding Era were tied heavily to local political parties, or were vanity press). In practice, the FEC almost never takes such charges, because at least some would fail Mills (though Mills was about uncoordinated expenditures, and Hamilton was clearly coordinating them), but the strict text would allow them.
Okay, so is the answer to the hypothetical then that yes the Federalist Papers would have been legal but they would have needed to include a "I'm James Madison and I approve this message" style notification?
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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?
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