Backed into a corner after weeks of hand-to-hand legal combat, majority Republicans in the Pennsylvania Legislature are reluctantly setting about drawing a new Congressional map.

Top Senate and House staffers said Tuesday their leaders have resigned themselves to try to comply with a Jan. 22 state Supreme Court order that ruled the current boundaries of Pennsylvania's 18 U.S. House districts unconstitutional due to extreme partisan gerrymandering.

In a 4-3 vote, the court further ordered the production of new maps for the House districts in time for the May primary election. The court-imposed deadline is Feb. 9, or Friday.

"Our belief, in consult with lawyers and others, is that it's better for us if we draw a map than if we don't. So that's our intention," said Drew Crompton, chief of staff to Senate Pro Tempore Joseph Scarnati, R-Jefferson County.

The work is apparently starting with conversations and comparisons of drafts between the majority GOP caucuses in the House and Senate.

Scarnati and House Speaker Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny County, both met with Gov. Tom Wolf Tuesday afternoon in Wolf's Capitol office, but there were no outward signs of a collaborative bi-partisan project.

"Regardless of the action of the Supreme Court we don't give up our majorities just because they don't like a map from 2011," noted Crompton.

Any bill creating new district lines, however, will have to earn Wolf's signature to become law. That may give the Democrat governor and his allies in the legislature some leverage on the new maps before week's end.

Republican leaders were still incensed at the fact that they are being forced to proceed in the absence of a majority opinion from a court that split 5-2 on the question of constitutionality.

"There's a lot of issues that we don't know what the court is thinking, and that puts us a little bit behind the eight-ball," Crompton said Tuesday afternoon.

"I get it. They (the districts) should be more compact. I get it. There should be the least amount of splits as feasible... But there's a lot more to drawing a map than simply those two parameters."

Still, a few possible parameters had begun to emerge by Tuesday afternoon for a replacement map.

Crompton said one factor Senate Republicans are very concerned about is trying to produce more compact districts while minimizing the number of voters who find themselves in new districts.

"There's something to be said for the least amount of disruption that you can cause for voters. So we're looking at that issue as well and trying to incorprate that into any proposal that we might support."

Crompton could not, as of Tuesday afternoon, provide a maximum threshold of voter switches the Senate GOP is seeking, but he said that analysis will be done on every map that "we are serious about."

In the vein of "limiting disruption," it also appears the GOP majorities will try to avoid pitting the 12 Congressional incumbents who are intending to seek re-election this year against one another.

And, it appears likely state officials will work to preserve the existing "minority-majority" district in Philadelphia, currently represented by U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans.

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 - have said it checks all Constitutional requirements, and argued the Democrat plaintiffs are simply seeking guarantees of proportional representation that do not exist.

But present-day GOP leaders seemed to hit a moment of reckoning after Monday's decision by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito denying their request for a stay of the state court's order.

One source familiar with the case, noting Alito's status as one of the more conservative members of the court, said even to hard liners still pushing for further legal manuevers, "getting nowhere with Alito... would be a strong dose of smelling salts."

The task ahead won't be easy, in part because the leaders have only left themselves three days to comply with the state court's Feb. 9 deadline for legislative action.

Further complicating matters, winter weather concerns threatened to knock out Wednesday as a legislative session day, and many representatives and senators are hoping to catch at least part of the Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl celebration on Thursday.

That raised the prospect of a Thursday night session in the House, where new map lines could make their first public appearance in the form of an amendment, followed by Friday votes in both chambers.

Wolf would then have six days to review the legislature's work, under the court's initial order.

Still, Turzai, Scarnati and others refused to completely retire the thought of more court action.

Legal sources noted that option could come into play if the General Assembly passed a map that fixes some of the most-eggregious gerrymandering in the current map, but the court still substitutes a different version.

GOP leaders reiterated earlier that - even if the court properly struck down the 2011 Congressional map - map-making is a legislative function and they intend to keep it that way.

"If Pennsylvania justices decide to start drawing maps of Congressional districts, we view that as a federal issue, and we will go to federal court," Scarnati said before his meeting with Wolf.

He also raised the future prospect of filing a complaint with the state Jucdical Conduct Board over Justice David Wecht's continued participation in the redistricting case despite 2015 campaign season comments railing against the state Congressional map as an example of extreme partisan gerrymandering.

Wecht, on Monday, said he was commenting at the time on gerrymandering generally as a problem, and felt he had fairly decided this case based on the facts and their application to the state Constitution.

Rank-and-file frustration over the situation bubbled into view Tuesday afternoon during a House State Government Committee meeting where the shell bill that ostensibly will carry the new district boundaries was moved to the House floor.

Several Republicans complained about activist courts being used to legislate election results.

Rep. Brad Roae, R-Crawford County, noted the current Congressional maps were used in 2012, "and the Democrats lost most of the races. In 2014, the Democrats lost most of the races. In 2016, the Democrats lost most of the races.

"So now they are suing to try to get it undone because they can't win," Roae continued.

Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Montgomery County, countered by challenging her colleagues to take the court's assignment "as a challenge that is worth the taking...

"Let's do our job," Dean said. "Let's get some maps that makes sense, that are compact..., and let's not count Republican votes versus Democratic votes. Let's be better than that."

PennLive Capitol Bureau Chief Jan Murphy contributed to this report.