There is a bitter fruit from the 2022 congressional elections: the bare majority Republicans won in the House of Representatives is the direct result of racial gerrymandering. A new Jim Crow is back, empowered - as was the original Jim Crow - by partisan right-wing justices on the Supreme Court. Americans voted for democracy in 2022, even as the Supreme Court voted to undermine it.

This fact is indisputable. Since January, judges in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio ruled that Republican legislators illegally drew congressional maps along racial or partisan lines. In the past, the judges would have ordered the preparation of new maps to ensure the elections were fair.

But these were the first elections after a new census since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, a decision that outrageously ignored the factual record and overturned legislation renewed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress. Legislating from the bench, five conservative justices revoked the pre-clearance procedures that would have forced changes in the maps in three of those states. Then the conservatives in a later decision added the insult of ruling that any state court or lower court decision outlawing maps in the election year would be stayed until after the election. The elections were held on maps that the lower courts found illegal.

Did it make a difference? Looking at those four states alone, David Wasserman, an election specialist at the Cook Report, concluded that the rejected maps in those four states - making up nearly 10 percent of the congressional seats - handed Republicans five to seven House seats that would otherwise not have won. That was more than the difference in holding the majority.

Add to that Florida, where the ambitious Republican governor rejected a first map to force a discriminatory and perversely partisan map that gave Republicans an additional four seats. That alone also would account for the size of the Republican majority.

But that is not all. In Arkansas, Republican legislators drew up a map that split the county that surrounds Little Rock into three districts to dilute the Black vote. This egregious violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act - which bars lines that "improperly dilute minorities' voting power - couldn't pass the smell test. Even the Republican governor refused to sign it, saying it raised troublesome concerns, but allowed it to go into law without his signature.

In Tennessee, Republican legislators deprived Nashville of representation, dividing the city up into three congressional districts to nullify the influence of Black voters. In Texas, where communities of color are growing the fastest, Republicans drew up new maps that, as Demetrius Fisher of the League of Women Voters concluded, "were racially gerrymandered and a blatant attempt to dilute the voice of Black, Latinx and Asian American Pacific Islander communities."

These injustices are the product of having no national standard for drawing districts, or for voting rules in general. The rules for elections are left to the states. The Voting Rights Act was passed to curb the vicious racial discrimination that essentially stripped Blacks of the right to vote across the South. Now, however, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has undermined the protections built into the law. That same conservative majority has also ruled that the federal courts will not review partisan gerrymandering at all. And created out of thin air a new doctrine that says that new maps drawn after a census and rule illegal by state or lower courts needn't be redrawn until after the next election.

Partisan gerrymandering undermines democracy. It allows politicians to choose their voters rather than voters choose their representatives. Racially discriminatory gerrymandering is still illegal under the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. Now, however, the partisan right-wing judges on the Supreme Court have opened the door to its revival. Voters in this election voted for democracy and against the election deniers. But racially discriminatory gerrymanders provided Republicans the House majority. And that's not just a shame; it's a crime.

You can write to the Rev. Jesse Jackson in care of this newspaper or by email at jjackson@rainbowpush.org. Follow him on Twitter @RevJJackson.