So the damn activist judges on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — taking a break from ruling the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, have ruled power lobbyist Harvey Whittemore and liquor distributor Larry Ruvo can build a 300-foot-long floating pier (with up to four boat lifts!) in front of property they own in Glenbrook at Lake Tahoe.

The pier has been controversial since 1999, when Whittemore tried to juice in permission to build the pier — despite opposition from a homeowners association and others — into a bill being considered by the Nevada Legislature. It must be nice, we thought at the time, to be part of a group so rich and so elite that whatever obstacles you encounter in your life can be erased by getting the Legislature to dance for you.

And the dancing continued, in the courts, for years. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency even came up with a plan this year to allow lots of new piers to be built on the lake, over the next 20 years, provided you’ve got $100,000 for a permit. (Whittemore and Ruvo spend that on their kept men and women in the Legislature, so why not a pretty pier?)

But now it looks like the system has spoken, and Harvey and his friend Larry get their own pier. They’ve contended they don’t have access to the community pier, so this will allow them to avoid mixing with the other millionaire property owners when spending weekends in Lake Tahoe, especially during the session, lifting glasses of Chardonnay and toasting the good life, as lawmakers bring them peeled grapes, wheels of cheese and perhaps a bit of caviar.

Then, the lawmakers can dance.

The thing about making a deal with the devil is the devil always gets your soul, and you never get what the devil promised. If you doubt that, just ask U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett, the Utah Republican.

Back in 2002, Bennett was summoned to the White House (along with his colleague, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch) to meet with then-Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. President Bush’s administration was worried about Yucca Mountain, and needed Hatch and Bennett on its side.

The dump, you’ll recall, had been recommended by Abraham, authorized by Bush, vetoed by Gov. Kenny Guinn and coming up for a vote in the Senate.

But Bennett and Hatch had worries of their own, namely a proposed above-ground, temporary nuclear waste dump on a Goshute Indian reservation in a place called Skull Valley, about 50 southwest of Salt Lake City. (That dump would be built by a consortium of energy companies dubbed “Private Fuel Storage.”)

Don’t worry, Abraham said. With Yucca Mountain, there won’t be a need for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license the Skull Valley dump. All the waste will be headed to Nevada. “If Yucca Mountain moves ahead, sites like the Utah site will not move ahead,” Abraham said in a July 9, 2002 Review-Journal story.

Despite the fact that waste would be headed to Nevada through Utah, Bennett and Hatch were persuaded; they voted with the Bush administration.

And then they got screwed. On Sept. 9, with Abraham long gone from the Energy Department and Bush eternally beyond accountability, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted to license the Skull Valley dump, clearing the way for 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel to be stored in 4,000 concrete-and-steel casks across 100 acres of concrete pads for 40 years.

So now, not surprisingly, Bennett has changed his mind. Quoted by the R-J, he admitted Nevada Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign had the right to tell him “I told you so.”

“If it does not make sense for us to take this nuclear waste and put it in a permanent repository, which is Yucca Mountain, why does it make sense to put it in an interim repository that does not have the safeguards that are built in to Yucca Mountain?” Bennett asked.

We’re not sure what he means by “safeguards,” since Yucca is prone to earthquakes, groundwater leaks and maybe even volcanic eruptions, if worse-case scenarios are to be believed. But we take his point: “Legally and practically,” Yucca is just not going to happen, Bennett said.

Hmm. If only someone had told Bennett this before he sold his vote to the Bushies for a promise that’s worth as much as some New Orleans real estate these days. Oh, wait, we seem to recall that someone did. The Utah senators were prime targets of lobbying from a totally ineffective ad campaign fielded by the state of Nevada (and conducted by the firm Brown & Partners) as well as totally ineffective lobbying from Ensign.

It’s easy to think that the victims of this game were the gullible Bennett and Hatch, who took the administration at face value and found that the Bush White House will lie to anybody in order to assist its friends in Big Energy. But they’re not; the senators should have known better, and their constituents should take out their anger at the political ineptitude in 2006 (when Hatch comes up for election) and 2010 (when Bennett is up).

No, the real victims are those who live anywhere near the route the waste will take to get to Skull Valley, as well as anyone who lives anywhere nearby. They’re all endangered so nuclear power plants can go on making “clean” energy and their owners can continue making cool profits.

“We told you so?” Nevada’s senators should be telling Bennett something a lot worse than that.