Politics & Power Quote by Sheila Jackson Lee

“By virtually any measure” is doing the heavy lifting here: it’s a preemptive strike against the predictable rebuttal that failure depends on where you stand. Sheila Jackson Lee frames her indictment as empirically obvious, not ideologically contingent, borrowing the tone of a scorekeeper rather than a partisan combatant. The phrase invites listeners to imagine a dashboard of metrics - jobs, wages, health care coverage, war costs, ethics investigations, deficits - and then to assume the numbers all point the same way. It’s an argument from breadth: you can pick your yardstick, she suggests, and the outcome doesn’t change.

“Record” and “Majority” are equally strategic. She’s not attacking a single bill or a personality; she’s prosecuting a governing era. In congressional politics, the majority owns the agenda: what gets a vote, what dies in committee, what gets funded, what gets ignored. By pinning the “record” on the Republican Majority, she collapses intra-party excuses and makes accountability the central theme.

“Appalling failure” is moral language disguised as performance evaluation. “Failure” claims incompetence; “appalling” adds an ethical shudder, implying not just that outcomes were bad but that they were unacceptable, maybe even predictable given priorities. The subtext is a campaign-ready contrast: Democrats as the party of measurable results, Republicans as stewards of a broken ledger. It’s also a call to impatience - a cue that normal disagreement won’t do, that this is a verdict demanding a change in power.