I can't remember ever seeing the term "judicial activist" to refer to anyone other than a judge supposedly engaging in "judicial activism."

But here's The Washington Post using the term to refer to a political activist who concerns himself with the judiciary: "Judicial activist directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ‘no mention of Ginni’/Leonard Leo told GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill nonprofit, then use money to pay spouse of Supreme Court justice."*

Who's Leonard Leo? The first sentence of the piece calls him "Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo," and the third paragraph calls him "a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges." He's not a judge, and he's not, at least not openly, a proponent of judicial activism.

In the 18-year archive of this blog, Leo's name has come up exactly once, back in 2006, when the NYT invited various legal writers to offer questions that could be asked of Samuel Alito at his confirmation hearing. I wrote:

Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, asks the one that Robert Bork gave his most damaging answer to: "why do you want to be on the Supreme Court?" (Bork said he thought it would be "an intellectual feast.")

"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted luxury trips around the globe for more than two decades... funded by Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman."

"The publication [ProPublica] said Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. It said the justice also has vacationed at Crow’s ranch in East Texas and has joined Crow at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive all-male retreat in California. ProPublica cited a nine-day trip that Thomas and his wife, Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas, took to Indonesia in 2019... which included flights on Crow’s jet and island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht, would have cost the couple more than $500,000 if they had paid for it themselves...."

 
From "Justice Thomas has accepted luxury travel for years from GOP donor, report says" (WaPo).

NYT headline: "Ginni Thomas Denies Discussing Election Subversion Efforts With Her Husband."

Subheadline: "In a closed-door interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Thomas reiterated her false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump." 

"Election Subversion Efforts" is quite a phrase. You could discuss a lot of things and still deny that any of it was "subversion." But I presume the actual interviewers did not restrict themselves to such an extreme topic.

During her interview, Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, repeated her assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Thompson said, a belief she insisted upon in late 2020 as she pressured state legislators and the White House chief of staff to do more to try to invalidate the results....

I wouldn't call that "election subversion." If you believe the election was already subverted, then in pushing for more procedural paths, you're trying to un-subvert it. If you think the announced results are invalid, you're trying to get to the true results, not "invalidate the results." It's very hard to wade through these loaded terms. I wish the NYT would play it dead straight.

Here it is, on camera, Ginni Thomas explicitly and emphatically telling Trump not to concede under any circumstance. "Don't give an inch," she says, invidiously. Be "relentless," she advises, shamelessly.

"But while my feminist sensibilities make me wary of suggesting that Ginni Thomas should not be completely free to embrace her causes and live her life..."

"... there’s something troublesome about the unbounded nature of her public advocacy, at least for those of us who still care about the Supreme Court.... As a Supreme Court spouse, Ginni Thomas has always been different. In November 1991, weeks after her husband’s apocalyptic confirmation hearing, she gave an interview to People magazine, appearing on the cover in her husband’s embrace with the headline, 'How We Survived.' The disappearing act of other Supreme Court spouses is not for Ms. Thomas. Justice Stephen Breyer’s wife, Joanna, a psychotherapist who works with children with cancer, stayed in Cambridge, Mass., to continue her career while her husband commuted from Washington on weekends. Martin Ginsburg gave up law practice when his wife first became a judge, embarking on a new career as a law professor....  [Ginni Thomas has] broken no rules except the rules of good taste. What she’s violated are longstanding norms of behavior. And in an age when nearly every norm is being shredded, that makes her the perfect Supreme Court spouse for our time."

That's Linda Greenhouse in "Family Ties at the Supreme Court/Do the political activities of Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife cross a line?" (NYT).

What did Ginni Thomas do exactly? Greenhouse links to "Trump Meets With Hard-Right Group Led by Ginni Thomas" by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni (NYT). Excerpt:

President Trump met last week with a delegation of hard-right activists led by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, listening quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military, according to three people with direct knowledge of the events....

It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government....

I'm skeptical about whether these "members of the group" actually "denounced transgender people and women serving in the military." It seems much more likely that they denounced some policies relating to these groups, not the human beings themselves. One could think transgenders shouldn't be in the military and women shouldn't be in combat without being hostile to these individuals. Indeed, one could hate heterosexual men and believe they absolutely do belong in the frontlines of military duty.

James Golden (AKA Bo Snerdly) was surprised to see NFL owners "line up against their fans, or a portion of their fan base..."

"... deciding that alienating some of the most patriotic people in the country makes good sense for a national sports league, and lining up behind some players that, in some cases, one wonders if they even know what they’re protesting about. It’s all very strange."

Strangely, he pronounces the word "strange" strahnge. I guess that's a joke (like saying garbahge for "garbage" (Rush has some running jokes like that)).

The interviewer is Ginni Thomas (the wife of Clarence Thomas). At about 8 minutes into the interview, Thomas asks Golden if he has any "triggers," and he immediately says "Anybody attacking Rush triggers me." He gets pretty emotional about that.