In fact, the Constitution says nothing about the president’s power to remove executive branch officials, a silence that has been filled from the earliest days of the nation “with a cacophony of disagreement and competing positions,” write Jonathan Gienapp and Andrea Scoseria Katz, two law professors who filed an amicus brief in the Slaughter case. Gienapp and Katz quote John Adams, who as president declined to jettison his political adversaries, even in the face of intense pressure from his allies. Doing so for nothing but a partisan reason, he said, would be “harsh and odious” and would “indicate an irritable, hasty, and vindictive temper.”