Americans are seeing the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices less and less like careful, impartial and independent interpreters of the law and more like political hacks.

That’s what the latest Gallup polling numbers show. Public approval of the court is down to 40%, the lowest ever recorded by Gallup since it began asking the question in 2000.

The six-member conservative majority appears ready to do some serious rewriting of U.S. laws, beginning with women’s reproductive rights and likely extending to Second Amendment and religious rights, as well.

The Supreme Court’s majority is likely to make rulings that many Americans will find deeply disconcerting. That was foreshadowed in the court’s “shadow docket” decision last month to let stand a Texas law that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy even in cases of rape or incest. The measure was unusual in that it left enforcement to private lawsuits, but the adverse effect on women’s constitutional rights as spelled out in Roe v. Wade was obvious.

The justices voted 5-4, without live argument or public scrutiny, to let Texas shut down its abortion providers while the law is litigated.

In less than two months, the court is expected to hear a Mississippi case that bans abortion at 15 weeks and represents the most serious challenge to Roe in years.

Small wonder that women in Maryland and elsewhere were driven to public protests this past weekend.

There is a pending New York case that could ban state restrictions on carrying handguns outside the home, a potential triumph for guns rights activists but potentially disastrous for efforts to reduce gun violence in cities like Baltimore.

A case from Maine could require taxpayers to help pay for religious education, a serious breach of the long-standing separation of church and state.

Given this reality, it’s almost comical for arch-conservative justices like Samuel Alito to stand up at favored venues like the University of Notre Dame and announce that the Supreme Court is “not a dangerous cabal.” Last week, he took issue with the court’s emergency docket being described as shadowy by the media and others, and described it as an effort to intimidate the court. But he did not mention in his Notre Dame lecture that the harshest criticism to date came from fellow Justice Elena Kagan, who rightfully sees the Texas law as patently unconstitutional. In her Texas dissent, she further observed as troubling the court’s increasing reliance on the shadow docket — to the extent that “every day [it] becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.” But yes, sure, let’s blame this on the media, which is, of course, the sort of thing partisan hacks do to shield dangerous cabals.

Clearly, Justice Kagan is on to something. Justice Amy Coney Barrett felt the sting of criticism so much that she defended the court as “not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks” in a speech just days after the Texas decision.

Granted, we can’t predict how the nation’s highest court will decide these and other controversial issues in the months ahead. But we can be assured that when they do rewrite the Constitution to their liking, the conservative majority will claim politics had nothing to do with it.