October has not been kind to Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled General Assembly.

Lawmakers predictably flubbed, at the last minute, a years-long effort to give voters the option to downsize the state House. They failed to respond legislatively to a grand jury report detailing decades of sexual abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church. And they continue to sit on bills that would reform the way sexual misconduct and harassment claims against current and former lawmakers are handled.

To be sure, there have been bright spots. Lawmakers rightly passed a bill that will keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and prevent them from storing their weapons with friends and family members. They updated, if imperfectly, the state’s mechanisms for getting people with serious mental illness help and treatment. And they rightly delayed the implementation of the state’s Keystone Exams as graduation requirements, noting correctly that the standardized tests aren’t working.

But on Monday came yet another reminder of the chambers’ penchant for folly and wasting time: the U.S. Supreme Court — for a third time — dismissed a challenge by Republican leaders seeking to get the state’s new, court-drawn congressional districts declared unlawful.

The challenge, filed in June by House Speaker Mike Turzai and Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, argued that the state Supreme Court usurped legislators’ authority when it redrew voting maps justices had previously declared unconstitutional.

Now that it has rightly been rejected by the High Court, we hope our legislative leaders will turn their full attention to the job of reforming Pennsylvania’s broken redistricting process.

That’s what they should have been doing all this time, rather than playing games in the court system in an effort to preserve the product of partisan gamesmanship that robs voters of the state Constitution’s promise of free and equal elections.

Pennsylvania residents deserve a stable and fair redistricting process that is free from the type of partisan games that resulted in the 2011 maps being invalidated by the court and creating districts with which no one — be they Democrat or Republican — can be satisfied.