This week, the Supreme Court can begin cleaning up a predictable mess — it was predicted by a justice at the time — that it made with a misbegotten decision 20 years ago. The justices in conference on Friday are set to begin considering whether to decide a case that gives the court an opportunity to overturn Kelo, a decision so bad it provoked the passage of many beneficial state laws.

When a regional health-care provider announced plans to build a hospital in downtown Utica, New York, Bryan Bowers, a local developer, and his partner saw an opportunity. They purchased an unoccupied building, planning to turn it into medical offices, which would have competed with a nearby building occupied by some incorporated cardiologists.

They, too, saw an opportunity, one dependent on getting government to employ coercion on their behalf. Wanting to turn the property that Bowers had bought into a parking lot, they asked a county government development agency to seize the property using its power of eminent domain. The agency did so, arguing that the cardiologists’ corporation would serve community prosperity better than Bowers’s plan would.

How did we get to government forcibly transferring property from Party A to Party B, a competitor, because government guesses (read on) that the latter will enhance local “betterment.” (And perhaps pay more taxes to the coercing government.) Here is how:

The Constitution — the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause — stipulates “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation” (emphasis added). At least 48 state constitutions contain a “public use” restriction on government’s eminent domain power. The phrase has, however, become frayed.

The Constitution’s framers were parsimonious with words and did not scatter adjectives carelessly. “Public use” meant for use by the general public, e.g., roads, bridges, courthouses, etc. But in 1954, in a case arising from D.C., the Supreme Court essentially rewrote “public use” as “public purpose,” a category capacious enough to encompass removing “blight.”

The blight was real in the D.C. neighborhood that the eminent domain case came from: Most dwellings did not have indoor toilets; tuberculosis and syphilis rates were high. Elsewhere, however, private developers, colluding with avaricious governments, began construing “blight” broadly to include cracked sidewalks, loose awning supports and other flimsy pretexts for wielding eminent domain power.

In Kelo, the court further diluted the concept of “public use,” making it mean “public benefit.” The court upheld (5-4) the New London (Connecticut) Development Corp.’s condemnation of a not-at-all-blighted blue-collar neighborhood so some unknown bigger taxpayer might benefit. After the condemnation, the Pfizer pharmaceutical corporation proposed, for a while, building a research facility where feral cats now roam.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, dissenting with William H. Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, presciently warned that the consequences of the decision “will not be random.” Affluent, articulate, well-lawyered factions would prey upon vulnerable, less sophisticated people.

In Kelo, the court tried to weave legal cobwebs that would restrain the locomotives of local governments. It said New London’s taking was constitutional only because it was part of a “carefully considered development plan.” (Not carefully enough. Twenty-five years later, the land on which the destroyed neighborhood flourished is empty except that construction of a non-taxpaying community center has begun.) And because the identity of the private beneficiary was “not known when the plan was adopted.”

In the Bowers case, crony capitalism is undisguised. His property is being taken (with compensation but against his will) for a specific private competitor. So much for the Kelo cobwebs. Lower courts construed Kelo to justify, even mandate, limitless deference to local governments wielding the life-shattering power of eminent domain.

The Kelo decision that diluted property rights was denounced by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist. It was, however, celebrated by — speaking of the predictable — a developer who, like others of his ilk, sees moneymaking opportunities in collaborations with rapacious governments empowered to expropriate the property of less isolated, not-well-connected individuals. Said Donald Trump of Kelo: “I happen to agree with it 100 percent.”

Since Kelo, 47 states have written laws making private-party-to-private-party forced transfers of property more difficult. The Institute for Justice, a.k.a. the fourth branch of government, which prods the third (judiciary) to make the other two behave, lost in Kelo. It is, however, representing Bowers in his attempt to alter what the court did in Kelo when it construed almost to disappearance a right enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.