ALL THE ATTENTION that the recent Supreme Court ruling has focused on the once-obscure topic of eminent domain could lead to improvements in state law — if politicians will look honestly at the ruling and the law and not get carried away in the populist uproar.

Frankly, we see little in Kelo v. New London to cause fear. While it may have made officials more aware of it, the ruling did not grant government any power that the U.S. Constitution had been seen as denying. And South Carolina already limits when government can force property owners to sell their land.

Still, lawmakers have always been far too promiscuous in handing out condemnation authority. They would do well to rescind that authority from all but elected bodies and state agencies that are accountable to the public. That means no power for colleges or for state agencies that are run by legislatively selected boards. That presents a problem with the Transportation Department, which clearly needs to condemn land; but it provides yet another reason to replace the Transportation Commission with a Cabinet secretary.

Nor should special-purpose districts, which shouldn’t even exist, have the power to condemn. As long as they do exist, they, like colleges, should make their cases for condemnation to their county or city governments.

Lawmakers also should address a bizarre set of provisions in the state constitution that gives seven counties the power to condemn “slum or blighted” land and turn it over to private developers; such power should be available to all counties or to none.

Still, we worry that the General Assembly, goaded by libertarian interests, will ignore what the recent controversy was about (a government that forced property owners to sell their property to make way for more attractive private development) and launch a broader assault on the principle that the public can force property owners to sell to the government for the public good.

Legislative hostility toward condemnation (and toward local government) is well-established. Recall, for instance, the bill that passed the House and nearly the Senate this year to force local governments to pay obscenely inflated prices to billboard owners when forcing them to comply with rules limiting visual blight.

Recent comments underline the concern. Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler’s promise of “swift and positive action” when lawmakers reconvene in January suggests that they have already decided on a simplistic, and likely overreaching, course of action.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Harrison isn’t content to stop at that. He told a news conference earlier this month that he would like lawmakers to restrict “regulatory taking” — a scary-sounding term for such essential practices as zoning. Lawmakers already tried to do that this year, with a bill that would have made it impossible for cities and counties to regulate where sexually oriented businesses, mega-hog farms, landfills or pretty much any other business could locate, and prevented them from imposing landscape requirements on mobile home parks or limiting where fireworks could be used or when bars had to close.

That bill, like the billboard-owners-enrichment bill, didn’t quite pass this year. But with some lawmakers preparing to turn their “homeowners’ protection” crusade into a libertarian Christmas tree of government-loathing, there’s good reason to worry about what 2006 will bring.