Lower courts have a lot more activist judges than SCOTUS. SCOTUS has fewer activist judges than they used to, and are now busy interpreting the law based on the constitution, not on what their own personal grievances are.
Federalist society is supporting textualist interpretation of the law. If you want the law to be different, then change the constitution. Having overly expansive interpetations of the constitution to make the law what you want is being an activist. Textualism is just going by what the law says.
They decided that the 14th amendment prohibition on insurrectionists being able to hold Federal office did not apply to Trump because he is not an officer of the United States (despite the fact he holds the "Office of the Presidency"). If that isn't deliberately misreading the actual words of the statute to get the result you want, what is?
This was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court and I think a large part of it was that an individual state could use this for political gain. As Kagan said during oral arguments: "I think the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States..."
They're interpreting the law based on how much they can contort the constitution to divert as much power to King Trump as possible while not completely thrashing their credibility.
Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially, as that would bind their hands with a future Democratic administration.
Like, whatever happened to the Major Questions Doctrine?
> Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially
The Supreme Court doesn't choose which docket to “use”; the interim docket (sometimes calls the “emergency docket” or “shadow docket”) is where applications for immediate action on cases that have not reached a final decision in lower court are handled. Decisions on the interim docket are more likely to be unsigned orders, but that's as true of the ones the administration has lost as the ones it has won.