The redistricting judicial panel did a good job with setting the congressional and legislative districts.

It’s high time Minnesota switches to a system that takes redistricting away from the partisan legislative branch and hands it to the nonpartisan (or at least far less partisan) judicial branch.

Why bother bogging down the Legislature with a task that it cannot accomplish? The Republicans and Democrats always are going to produce district maps that are laughable.

Sure, there are some who will complain about the judicial panel’s maps, but it appears to anyone who followed the process that the judges took into account — to a degree — the requests of people who attended hearings. Otherwise the judges draw lines that made population equity the main priority.

Of the state’s 201 legislators, 46 were thrown into districts with fellow incumbents. That makes it clear the judges weren’t studying where incumbents resided so much as what lines make sense considering the past decade’s shift in population away from rural areas toward urban areas.

Minnesota has the good sense to have the judicial panel handle redistricting. Some states do not. Our state just needs to drop that initial wrangling by lawmakers that, over the past decades, always results in the maps being drawn by the judges anyway.