SAY NO---justices don’t care about political constraints.

That the recent decisions by the conservative majority court may not be in tune with average Americans is backed up by recent polling and surveys. But those rulings also signal a newly unapologetic and muscular court, willing to buck the national mood.

"They're using their conservatism in a powerful way and they're acting like they're in a hurry," said Stephen Wermiel, a constitutional law professor at American University Washington College of Law.

"For a long time, we've been looking at a conservative tugboat. And now we're looking at a conservative runaway freight train."

That freight train has pushed through some strongly conservative-minded decisions over the past weeks. Along with overturning Roe v. Wade, the 6-3 conservative majority effectively expanded gun rights in New York state and ruled that a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray on the field.

On Thursday, in a blow to the fight against climate change, the court also ruled 6-3 that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

"I would say that [the conservative bloc] view their job as interpreting the Constitution and that is divorced from from public opinion," said Amy Howe, a reporter with SCOTUSblog, which covers the court.

Polls show that some of the those decisions have not been in line with public attitudes. For example, a CBS News/YouGov poll found that 59 per cent of Americans disapproved of overturning Roe v. Wade, compared to 41 per cent who approved. As for gun rights, about half of the voters in the 2020 presidential election said gun laws in the U.S. should be made more strict, according to an AP VoteCast survey.

A research paper published this month found that the court has, since 2020, become much more conservative than the public and is now more similar to Republicans in its ideological position on key issues.

"In 2010 and 2020, the court was actually very close to the average American in its decisions," said Neil Malhotra, a professor of political economy at Stanford University, and one of the three researchers of the study.

During its 2021 and just-ended 2022 terms, the court was "was much more similar to the average Republican."

This is a very recent phenomenon, he said.

For years, the Supreme Court had leaned conservative, with a 5-4 majority, but some justices were considered more moderate and didn't always rule along pure conservative ideological lines.

But that has since changed. Today's court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has six conservative judges who are generally more aligned.