This week, the Supreme Court can begin cleaning up a predictable mess that it made with a misbegotten decision 20 years ago. The justices in conference 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, N.Y., 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.

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’ 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.)

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.

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.

The Kelo decision that diluted property rights was denounced by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist. It was, however, celebrated by 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%.”

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.