Politics once was like two people negotiating a real estate deal.

The seller would present the house in its best light — baking cookies so it smelled homey, sprucing up the front porch and hiding the water damage from that leaky roof — all while asking for the highest price possible.

Meanwhile, the buyers would pretend blue paint in the living room was worth walking away from a deal, and they would put in an offer better suited to a beat-up Chevette with no muffler than a three-bedroom house in a good school district.

Both sides knew it was a dance designed to get them to a middle ground everyone could accept.

That’s how politics is supposed to work. Everyone is supposed to get a little of what they want, and everyone is supposed to bend a bit to get there.

The redistricting maps show how legislators can’t do that anymore. Instead, there is nothing but a focus on winning and running up the score, leaving the other side in a heap. If someone isn’t broken, no one really won, it seems.

The state Supreme Court decided on the final congressional map this week, selecting the Carter map, which produced a blocky map with a minimum of weird shapes that cut around communities to push the final representation too much in one direction.

Is it perfect? No. The map had to take 18 districts split right down the center with nine Democrats and nine Republicans and whittle it to 17 because of the 2020 U.S. Census numbers. Tipping the balance of the delegation was destined to happen this time, as was dissatisfaction by some.

But this map does things that will benefit each major party.

Pittsburgh stays in one district, which could go Republican as Democrat Conor Lamb, who has faced hard battles to win his seat three times, is not seeking reelection as he campaigns for U.S. Senate.

It also creates a protective bubble for another swing district, Republican Brian Fitzpatrick’s Philadelphia seat, while making Democrat Susan Wild’s Allentown district a little less secure by folding in the very red Carbon County.

At the same time, Democratic incumbents won’t contend with new districts, and racially or culturally defined urban areas were not carved up.

What it all comes down to is a map that is likely to keep the status quo for much of Pennsylvania, with the exception of the parties playing a high-stakes game of musical chairs while fighting for possession of that 17th seat.

But it shouldn’t take a court to decide this. It’s the legislators’ job, not the judges’. That, however, is a job they have abdicated by their failure to come to a decision for the third consecutive redistricting. A federal lawsuit filed Monday by Republicans ahead of the state justices’ decision tried to stop the picking of the map on the grounds that it wasn’t the court’s job.

It’s not, but someone has to do it, do it in a timely fashion and be satisfied with a map that is as close to a middle ground as possible rather than looking to shortchange Pennsylvanians with a map tipped wildly in one direction or the other.

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