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HARRISBURG — Top Republican lawmakers Tuesday said they would ask the U.S. Supreme Court this week to step in and put a hold on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling that gerrymandering congressional districts is unconstitutional.

The GOP leaders said Monday’s state court’s decision lacks clarity, precedent and respect for the constitution and would introduce chaos into the state’s congressional races, they said.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state’s widely criticized congressional map Monday, granting a major victory to Democrats who alleged the 18 districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to benefit Republicans, setting off a scramble to draw a new map.

The Senate’s top Republican lawyer, Drew Crompton, called the timeline to draw new districts “borderline unworkable,” but said Republicans will do everything they can to comply.

The decision has immediate implications for the 2018 election, meaning that 14 sitting members of Congress and dozens more people are planning to run in districts they may no longer live in. The deadline to file paperwork to run in primaries is March 6.

It also has implications for GOP control of Congress, since only Texas, California and Florida send more Republicans to the U.S. House than Pennsylvania.

The decision came as the U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether redistricting can be so partisan that it violates the U.S. Constitution, in cases from Maryland and Wisconsin. The court also last week put on hold a lower court order in a gerrymandering case from North Carolina that gave lawmakers there two weeks to redraw the state’s congressional districts.

The nation’s high court has never struck down an electoral map as a partisan gerrymander.

However, Monday’s decision in Pennsylvania could provide a new avenue to gerrymandering claims.

It is the first state court decision to throw out a congressional map because of partisan gerrymandering, said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Li said there isn’t a clear federal basis for the U.S. Supreme Court to step into the case, and that the state Supreme Court should have the final say in a case under state law.

“That’s a real long shot,” Li said, “but the stakes are high and it’s not surprising that (Republicans) would ask.”

Republicans who controlled Pennsylvania’s Legislature and governor’s office following the 2010 census broke decades of geographical precedent when redrawing the map, producing contorted shapes. They shifted whole counties and cities into different districts in an effort to protect a Republican advantage in the congressional delegation. They succeeded, as Republicans in the delegation grew from 12 to 13, even as Pennsylvania lost a seat to account for the state’s relatively slow population growth.

The court’s five Democrats all agreed that the state’s congressional map is unconstitutional. Four of the five Democratic justices backed the decision to throw out the map immediately, while one Democrat, Justice Max Baer, warned that chaos would ensue and argued it would be better to put a new map in place in 2020. The two Republican justices dissented.

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By Marc Levy

Associated Press