"Certainly, if Mueller wanders outside the bounds of professionalism and basic integrity, he can and should be fired."

"Concerns are already being raised — including about Mueller’s friendship with Comey and his staff-packing with anti-Trump partisans. He will be closely watched. In the meantime, Congress is busily carrying on its constitutionally ordained function of oversight. What we’ve seen over the past week has not been pretty, but it is effective and important.... Notwithstanding reports that the special counsel has launched an inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice, the early returns also suggest the absence of any Oval Office criminality, even with the unsettling use of Trump Tower business methods where they don’t belong.... [T]he official processes now under way should continue unimpeded. Let the legislative and executive branches fulfill their respective roles, ordained at the founding and matured by the wisdom of sobering experience gained over the course of seven generations."

Writes Kenneth Starr in a WaPo op-ed with the silly title "Firing Mueller would be an insult to the Founding Fathers."

Silly, because Starr doesn't mention the "founding fathers" or fret about "insulting" eminent figures of the past. In the context of highlighting the practical value of an independent prosecutorial function, Starr refers to the "structural arrangements put in place at the founding of the nation and augmented through the experience of succeeding generations." If he were about venerating the choices of the founding fathers, he wouldn't have said "augmented through the experience of succeeding generations." The founding fathers adopted a text that said: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States." If you wanted to respect that — rather than "the experience of succeeding generations" — you'd align with Justice Scalia, who dissented in the case that approved of the independent counsel law:

In his analysis of the statute, Scalia relied on constitutional text, pointing out that Article II vests not some but all of the executive power in a president. And because it does, the independent counsel law must be unconstitutional "if the following two questions" are answered affirmatively: "Is the conduct of a criminal prosecution .  .  . the exercise of purely executive power?" and "Does the statute deprive the President of the United States of exclusive control over the exercise of that power?" Scalia said they must be answered affirmatively: the first because "governmental investigation and prosecution of crimes is a quintessentially executive function," the second because "the whole object of the statute" is to deny a president exclusive control over the exercise of purely executive power.

That's the losing side, of course, but the independent counsel law — the law under which Starr dogged Bill Clinton — died a natural death in 1999.