Three words loom largest now about Monday's split decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that calls for a 19-day rewrite of the state's current Congressional map, effective for the May 15 primary election.

If it stands.

Leaders of Republican-controlled state legislature quickly vowed to seek a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court that would put the decision on ice, just as it has issued stays in other mapping cases this winter.

"No matter how you cut this, this is a federal court issue," said Drew Crompton, chief of staff to Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson County. That nexis starts, Crompton said, with the fact that the seats at stake are in the federal legislature.

"We suspect that the U.S. Supreme Court will hopefully have interest in this as they've had interest in the North Carolina case," he said, referring to an order earlier this month suspending a separate court's redistricting order there while the U.S. Supremes consider a third redistricting challenge, out of Wisconsin.

Attorneys for the voter plaintiffs in the Pennsylvania case, however, said they felt confident Monday's ruling would stand.

Their case, attorney Stanton Jones noted, was solely based on the Pennsylvania constitutional claims, and they will argue that case precedent dictates the state court gets deference in this situation.

"This decision means that Pennsylvania voters will finally have the opportunity to cast their ballots under a fair and constitutional map," said David Gersch, the lead attorney for 18 Democratic voters bringing the state suit.

"The current map is the worst partisan gerrymander in Pennsylvania's history. The Court was right to strike it down."

About the decision.

The court's order broke sharply along partisan lines.

Justices Max Baer, Christine Donahue, Kevin Dougherty, Debra Todd and David Wecht, all found the current maps - crafted after the 2010 census by a Republican-controlled General Assembly and approved by then-Gov. Tom Corbett, also a Republican - "clearly, plainly and palpably violates" the state constitution.

All were elected to the state court as Democrats.

Donahue, Dougherty, Todd and Wecht then signed off on that part of the order giving the current legislature first crack at developing a new map, with a deadline of sending it to Gov. Tom Wolf by Feb. 9.

While historically that's a short time frame for redistricting, evidence produced in the case has made it abundantly clear that with today's technology, maps can be generated very quickly once the parameters are agreed to.

Wolf would then have until Feb. 15 to accept or reject it.

If the Democratic governor and Republican legislative leaders fail to reach a consensus, the court said it could move to impose its own plan for the state's 18 U.S. House districts.

Either step, the majority held, should provide enough time to proceed with this spring's scheduled May 15 primary.

Baer, notably, said he would have permitted this year's elections to proceed under the existing lines, arguing that changes this close to the election cycle could lead to significant voter confusion.

The two Republican judges on the court, Chief Justice Tom Saylor and Justice Sally Mundy, disagreed with the majority.

They wrote that while there may be valid concerns over Pennsylvania's Congressional map, it can't be ruled unconstitutional - or properly replaced - without further guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The partisan breakdown of Monday's ruling was not lost on another partisan, Val DiGiorgio, chairman of the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania.

He called the decision "a partisan attempt to overturn the will of the legislature, which approved these congressional maps with Democrat votes in 2011.

"The only things that have changed between then and now are makeup of the court and Democrats being dissatisfied with the results (of the Congressional elections)."

The plaintiff's attorneys downplayed the state court's split Monday, noting neither of the Republican justices, Saylor or Mundy, actually argued the current map should be upheld.

If there was partisanship in this issue, Gersch said, the crafters of the 2011 map have only themselves to blame. "The map is what's partisan, and the legislature is what brought about this result," he said.

Several recently-developed measures have held Pennsylvania's map up as one of the most partisan maps in the nation, though its defenders have argued those barometers are only academic exercises that must be subordinate to real voters' wishes, expressed in the context of real candidates, campaigns and issues.

The impact.

If it stands, the new map envisioned by the state court's decision - built on principles of compactness and contiguity, in addition to equal population - will impact every one of Pennsylvania's 18 U.S. House districts.

Pennsylvania's current, and endangered, Congressional map.

In many cases, like those districts anchored in the city of Philadelphia or the state's Republican 'T', the changes will be politically negligible.

But in others, it is quite likely that some candidates who have already launched campaigns in one district could - by the middle of next month - find themselves in a different arena.

Political analysts see the biggest impact in the Philadelphia suburbs, where tortured efforts to arrive at just-so, partisan math have led to Jackson Pollock-style lines.

Other changes could be coming in and around Pennsylvania 12th District, what some have called the "hammerhead shark" now super-imposed from the Ohio line to the Johnstown area, or in the elongated districts of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Monday's decision also left candidates, especially those who live toward the edges of the districts as they are, in the position of recalibrating their strategies on the fly.

Typical is the case of Dauphin County Commissioner Mike Pries, a Republican seeking to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, but who lives on the very western end of the sprawling 15th District.

Any move toward compactness may put Pries in any one of several other districts, and quite possibly one occupied by another Republican incumbent. Attempts to reach Pries for this story were not successful.

State Rep. Steve Bloom, R-Carlisle, launching a campaign to succeed U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta from the southern end of the current 11th Congressional District, was thrust into a similar position by Monday's order.

"The only thing I can do is keep working hard and try to stay focused on the things that are under my control, and then see how things are when the dust settles" when the court fights are over, he said Monday night.

At the national level, Democratic Party officials salivated over what they saw as an enhanced opportunity to tilt the current 13-Republican, five-Democrat Pennsylvania delegation in their direction.

That's big for them because if Democrats are to have any hope of taking back majority control in the U.S. House this year, most political experts say, it would almost certainly need to pick up one or more seats in Pennsylvania.

"Today's decision is a victory for democracy and another blow to the Republican Party's nationwide effort to game the system," Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement to The Washington Post.

What's next.

Pennsylvania's current election deadlines call for candidates to begin circulating nominating petitions to get on the spring primary ballots starting Feb. 13. That process runs through March 6.

Crompton, speaking for the Senate leaders, said Monday that while their preference is for a stay, they will also start to work with House leaders on replacement maps. Just in case.

"We're not going to be foolish," Crompton said.

"The timeline (as set by the court) is what the timeline is, even though we disagree. So we will try to pursue maps to the best of our ability in the time frame that we've got."