Reddit reviews Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court Is Not a Court and Its Justices Are Not Judges

No, they absolutely don't. They *pretend* to care about precedent, but they overturn things all the time based on ideological beliefs and often rule against their own precedent, at least on important, ideologically divisive matters.

And that boils down to, as Eric Segall used for the title of a very good introduction book on the subject (though not the only one), that SCOTUS is not a court. It's a tribe of elders imposing value judgements when the Constitution has, by definition, no actual answers for the problems at hand (see: affirmative action, abortion, gun rights, etc.)

That's why a decision about, for example, if the printed currency of the United States is valid currency can be overruled within a year because one SCOTUS judge changed. Or why Scalia could overrule 200 years of precedent and declare in 2008 that the 2nd amendment is an individual right, even though we had clear, settled law that always declared that it was a collective one.

The way that they justify these decisions comes from different systems of value applications (living constitutionalism, one of the many different kinds of originalism, etc.) but it's all values, even if they like to pretend otherwise.

In fact, that the American public continues to perceive that SCOTUS IS a court and that it does care about precedence in contentious cases is one of the biggest cons of the American education system. And it's what keeps people from believing that the SCOTUS would ever overturn Roe because it's settled law, for instance, but the reality is they will overturn Roe in a heartbeat if Roberts decides it's OK politically.

SCOTUS is politics wherever the answers are not obvious.

You might enjoy this: https://www.amazon.com/Supreme-Myths-Court-Justices-Judges/dp/0313396876/