> For example, proposed laws to limit abortions fail in a lot of places: the majority of the population favors access to abortions. The Republicans got a Supreme Court that will judicially do what would be legislative suicide.
It's more complicated than that. You certainly have states where the majority of the population doesn't favor abortion access or doesn't care that much, and all any conceivable Supreme Court decision will do is allow the state legislators in those areas to legislate in ways the local population accepts, which won't be political suicide for them. That much is a fact, because restricting abortion access (regardless if it stands or not) has been a winning issue for those legislators for a decade or more.
> There's a ton of other issues that are like this, from marriage equality to drug de-criminalization to "intellectual property" to regressive taxing that would be legislatively impossible (Republicans losing power) but will almost certainly be accomplished judicially.
What you say would be true if the US was a "unitary" government, with non-geographic elections (e.g. by party list), but that's just not how it's structured.