Members of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court didn't bother concealing their split views over the state's current map of U.S. House districts in the climax of a key redistricting case Wednesday.

But loving or hating that map was really beside the point in Wednesday's two-and-a-half hours of argument at the State Capitol.

The real key, both for the grassroots activists who are battling the status quo and the legislative leaders seeking to defend it, is whether the court can reach a consensus that the map's skewed lines violate state constitutional guarantees to free speech, and free and fair elections.

Petitioners seeking new districts for this year's election cycle - initially including the state League of Women Voters and 18 Democratic voters - argued it's time for the court to set a standard that permits political considerations in redistricting, but only so long as they don't obliterate all other standards like contiguity and preserving communities of interest.

Without those checks, they assert, Republican elected officials were able in 2011 to practice a form of "viewpoint discrimination" that effectively devalued the participation of Democratic-leaning voters.

Defenders of the current map countered that their product - as produced by the General Assembly and signed into law by then-Gov. Tom Corbett - meets all established legal tests in Pennsylvania.

The change the plaintiffs seek, they counter, rely on rights that don't exist.

"There is no right to proportional representation (based on statewide voter registration)," argued attorney Mark Braden. "There is no right to vote for somebody who wins."

The arguments were a 150-minute encapsulation of a debate over a map that has reliably produced a 13 Republican, five Democrat Pennsylvania delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2012.

The case has arrived at the court just four weeks before candidates are permitted to start the process of getting their names placed into nomination for the 2018 elections.

The Congressional map, under current Pennsylvania law, is drawn after each federal census and brought to life in a bill. Districts must be of equal population, and geographically contiguous.

Plaintiffs argue Republican legislative majorities in 2011 essentially broke the process through a systematic classification of voters by political preference that made a mockery of contiguity, and shredded traditional notions like preserving of communities of interest in order to produce GOP-leaning battlefields.

The results can be seen, they said, in the bullet-proof GOP Congressional wins, even in the face of consistent statewide wins by Democratic candidates in 2012 and 2014.

The legislative defendants here, House Speaker Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny County, and Senate President Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati, R-Jefferson County, said those results are primarily a function of candidates and campaigns.

Attorney Jason Torchinsky argued the plaintiffs in their "viewpoint discrimination" argument, are asking the court to give the same kind of protections to political affiliation that it has to racial minorities.

But, he said, they can't support that legally.

"A person's race does not change," Torchinsky noted, but individual's political viewpoints do. "If you're a Democrat when you're born, you're not necessarily a Democrat when you die."

As a case in point, attorney Lawrence Tabas pointed to election results from 2016, in which voters in the state's 7th Congressional District supported Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, but re-elected their Republican Congressman Pat Meehan.

Far from proving the pre-ordained results from this map, Tabas said, those results prove "that the voters went in there independently in that district and chose candidates."

It's the 7th, overlaying the Philadelphia suburbs, that has been lampooned nationally as one of the worst examples of gerrymandering; it's sometimes referred to as "Goofy Kicking Donald Duck."

Political results always change based on the candidates running, the issues of the day and the mood of the electorate, Torchinsky and Braden summed up.

The only way the plaintiffs could carry the day in this case would be if they could show that groups of voters were actually being barred from voting or otherwise participating in the political process, and that has not happened.

The plaintiffs presented a different view.

American courts have identified partisan gerrymandering as a potential problem in the past. But they have so far been unable to land on a bright line definition of what constitutes too much.

As Justice Debra McCloskey Todd noted at one point in Wednesday's argument, "you are asking us to go further than any other court has gone on that issue."

The plaintiffs response was, in a word, yes.

They contended Pennsylvania's 2011 mapping process was a unique confluence of concentrated political power and technology that created a level of partisan gerrymandering that crossed that so-far-undefined threshold.

It was, argued attorney David Gersch, a point where the most important factor in drawing the lines was the intentional sorting of voters based upon how people vote.

And that, he said, is viewpoint discrimination.

Attorney Mark Aronchick, representing current Gov. Tom Wolf, noted that if a new map was put in place by Feb. 20, Pennsylvania's election officials could stick to the current election schedule.

Or, he added, the court could move the May 15 primary into June or July with no significant disruption to the November election schedule.

Both, Aronchick said, can be managed by the state's election professionals. "What can't be managed is looking the other way that this unconstitutional map... Pennsylvania would become a joke."

Wednesday's arguments followed a week-long hearing before Commonwealth Court Judge Kevin Brobson in December to create an evidentiary record.

Brobson, in his recommended findings to the court, found the plaintiffs did use partisan considerations in building the map.

But, he concluded, the voters "failed to meet their burden of proving that the 2011 plan... clearly, plainly, and palpably violates the Pennsylvania Constitution."

It appeared likely from Wednesday's courtroom give-and-take, however, that the justices will be making their own ruling.

Chief Justice Tom Saylor asked if there really was a partisanship problem when the number of Democratic registered voters exceed the number of Republicans in nine of the 18 districts.

Justice Sally Mundy challenged plaintiffs on whether it mattered that three valid elections have already been held under the current maps, with the election winners serving and representing Pennsylvanians in Congress.

But several of their colleagues - including Justices David Wecht, Christine Donahue and Max Baer - seemed troubled by evidence that voters are now being categorized primarily on how they've voted in the past.

And Wecht, at one point, reminded both lawyers and his colleagues that judges in past redistricting cases had seemed to set the stage for a day when "technology has changed the game," giving this court precisely the room it needs to set its own standard.

If the court agrees with the plaintiffs, there are several options available.

Most likely, it seems, would be ordering the Republican-controlled General Assembly to produce a new set of maps - agreeable to Democrat Wolf - within a matter of weeks.

The court could also appoint a special master, the plaintiffs suggested, to take over the redistricting process if the legislative process breaks down.

The legislative defendants suggested a third way. They argued that if the court holds the current map unconstitutional, it should order that fix for the 2020 election cycle.

There was one small point of agreement Wednesday.

All sides appeared to concede that a special election set for March 13 to elect a successor to former U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, who resigned in October after a scandal that centered on an extra-marital affair, should proceed as scheduled, and under the current maps.

The winner of that election would serve for the remainder of this year.

The court, given the tight timelines of the election cycle, is expected to issue its decision within a matter of weeks.