I can't shake the feeling the Court is Congress reaping what it has sown

[Effete Snob]

30. It is not ALWAYS the final stop

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act is an example of Congressional action to effectively reverse a Supreme Court decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Freedom_Restoration_Act

"The bill was introduced by Congressman Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on March 11, 1993. A companion bill was introduced in the Senate by Ted Kennedy (D-MA) the same day. A unanimous U.S. House and a nearly unanimous U.S. Senate—three senators voted against passage[3]—passed the bill, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law."

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What happened is that the Supreme Court had to occasionally decide "when does a law restrict religious freedom too much".

The prime case was a native American who was being held in a federal prison. His religion involved the use of peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus species which is a Schedule I narcotic.

The Supreme Court ruled that the prevailing judicial test of religious encumberment permitted the government to enforce the laws against peyote, and the prisoner did not have the right to practice his religion to the extent it required using peyote.

That and several other cases caused both the left AND the right to join together to say, "Nope, we are going to pass a federal law that recalibrates what other federal laws are subject to religious exemptions.

Continuing with Wikipedia:

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This law reinstated the Sherbert Test, which was set forth by Sherbert v. Verner, and Wisconsin v. Yoder, mandating that strict scrutiny be used when determining whether the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, guaranteeing religious freedom, has been violated. In the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Congress states in its findings that a religiously neutral law can burden a religion just as much as one that was intended to interfere with religion; therefore, the Act states that the "Government shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability."

The law provided an exception if two conditions are met. First, the burden must be necessary for the "furtherance of a compelling government interest." Under strict scrutiny, a government interest is compelling when it is more than routine and does more than simply improve government efficiency. A compelling interest relates directly to core constitutional issues. The second condition is that the rule must be the least restrictive way in which to further the government interest.
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So, after the passage of this law, the Supreme Court could not decide that some other test applied. Because, and this is worth understanding, the Constitution is mainly concerned with whether the government is restricting your rights, not expanding them.

But, in a purely structural way, it makes it very difficult to say "oh, this federal law applies generally with no religious exemption" when there is another law that defines how religious exemptions are to be understood to be a part of all other federal laws, provided the conditions are met.

RFRA has had an interesting history since then, and there are some further nuances.

But, yes, Congress can pass a law that defines what the limits of other laws can be, and RFRA is one of several examples of going back to Congress after a bad court decision in order to get a federal law to fix the court decision.

The problem is that our political system has become so sclerotic that people don't really understand how to use it dynamically.