Proposed: POTUS? Security Clearance 1st

Sheryl Canter
2 min readJul 13, 2017

With Donald Trump’s history (mob associations, fraud, perjury, financial misdeeds, housing discrimination, and worse) he would never get a security clearance in the usual way. And yet he now has access to our country’s most sensitive secrets.

Trump’s shocking conduct as president has uncovered dozens of frightening holes in the Constitutional requirements and ethical rules governing the executive branch. It wasn’t until a dishonorable man won the presidency and tested the boundaries that we learned we’d been operating under an honor system. It will take years — decades — to plug all the holes. But there is one easy fix:

REQUIRE ALL CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES TO PASS A SECURITY CHECK.

No one (like Trump) who is utterly lacking a moral compass could ever pass a security check. With this one simple fix, the honor system will be good enough until the rest of the holes can be plugged by codifying the traditions of honorable people.

Right now, the only requirements for POTUS are being native-born and at least 35 years of age. We need to add “and pass a security check”. It’s a dead-obvious requirement and should be in there already, anyway. Probably it should be an Amendment to the Constitution, but maybe there’s an easier way to do it. Thoughts?

How do we start a grassroots movement to make this a requirement? Where do we begin? Please post ideas in the comments. I’d like this to be the start of a discussion.

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