What have we learned?

That’s the question that should be on the tip of every tongue — voters’ and elected officials’ alike — after two federal courts on Monday rejected appeals by Republicans seeking to have the state’s new, court-drawn congressional voting districts thrown out.

The court-drawn maps were issued last month, after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Jan. 22 threw out Republican-drawn districts that had been in use since 2012 and the Republican-controlled state legislature failed to submit a new map by a court-imposed deadline.

Monday’s rulings — by a federal three-judge panel in Harrisburg, which issued a 27-page decision; and the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected the GOP appeal in a one-sentence filing — seemed to be the end of the road for Republicans hoping to extend the use of their obviously gerrymandered map one more election cycle.

Good. It’s about time voters and candidates had some surety in all this — a consideration that appears to have been mostly absent from the minds of the people and involved in this mess.

Yes, a revision of Pennsylvania’s congressional map — which has been rightly derided as one of the nation’s most blatant examples of gerrymandering — was a desirable outcome.

But the ends do not justify the means by which this shakeup was achieved. It was conducted on a truncated timeline and involved all of the political maneuvering and rancor of, well, an election.

The lesson we have gleaned from all of this is that very few powerful people in Pennsylvania have voters’ best interests at heart.

That makes it all the more vital that we move away from our current, politically-driven redistricting process and implement a system that focuses on what is most important when it comes to drawing legislative districts: fair elections, contiguous and compact congressional boundaries, and doing everything possible to avoid splitting up municipalities or voting precincts.

That’s what will serve Pennsylvania voters best. And it will be much easier to deliver that outcome if redistricting is the purview of an independent citizens commission.

To make that happen legislators will need to revise the Pennsylvania constitution and take redistricting power away from themselves — a very tall order.

Nonetheless, two bills — House Bill 722 and Senate Bill 22 — have already been proposed and would do just that. They simply need support from legislators.

HB 722, which has more than 100 sponsors, languishes in the House State Government Committee, where last week a resolution was presented that would shield the committee from giving it further consideration.

That’s exactly the opposite of what legislators should be doing. This is not an impossible or avoidable task. It is a necessary one.