The U.S. Supreme Court has again refused to bring the nation's high court into Pennsylvania's Congressional redistricting war.

A court majority on Monday denied state Republican legislative leaders' request for an emergency stay that would block the use of a district map drawn by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the looming election cycle.

The map was imposed Feb. 19, four weeks after the court ruled Pennsylvania's existing map violated the state constitution's guarantee of "free and equal" elections by marginalizing Democratic vote counts through extreme gerrymandering.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had denied an earlier stay request on Feb. 5, during a time when the legislature and Gov. Tom Wolf still had a window to adopt a corrective plan through traditional legislation.

The state court proceeded to draft and impose its own map after lawmakers and the governor failed to act.

The Supreme Court case seemed to be state Republicans' last realistic chance to preserve the current map of 18 U.S. House districts; earlier Monday, a three-judge panel sitting in Harrisburg refused to issue a preliminary injunction in a separate suit filed by several of the state's incumbent Congressmen.

If the court's decision stands, this is an extraordinary break with tradition in a system in which maps are routinely adjusted for population shifts every 10 years, after completion of the federal census.

Still, in the world of real politics, the Pennsylvania Department of State and most candidates have already started taking real steps toward a primary based on the new maps.

Candidates for Pennsylvania's 18 House seats were able to start circulating petitions to get on the primary election ballot Feb. 27. They are to have those signatures filed by March 20.

At that point, hopefully, candidates, elections officials, and the public at large will all get a final sense of what the political battlefield will look like for Pennsylvania's 18 U.S. House seats.

The case arose from a lawsuit filed last summer by 18 registered Democrat voters and the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, who alleged that partisan cutting of the Congressional lines after the 2010 census amounted to "viewpoint discrimination" against Democratic voters.

In a December trial, they presented evidence that a series of 500 maps built on traditional redistricting principles and past vote counts never replicated the current 13 Republican. five Democrat split in Pennsylvania's Congressional delegation.

Defenders of the 2011 map - drafted by a Republican-controlled General Assembly and then-Gov. Tom Corbett - countered that it checks all Constitutional requirements, and argued the Democrat plaintiffs are simply seeking guarantees of proportional representation that do not exist.