The next meeting of the Texas legislature starts in January, and House and Senate members just started the process of filing new bills. Over the next few months, these bills will be refined in committees, emerge for a vote, and potentially signed into law. But right now, they are the raw materials for the next two years of state policy in Texas.
The Texas Legislature does a good job of publishing bills as they are filed. Their website has a comprehensive list in the order they were filed. But what if you want to know what your representatives are up to? Do you know what House and Senate district you live in? Do you know who represents you in the state legislature? Off the top of my head, I just don’t. And I’m not going to make room in my head for it anytime soon.
So back in 2016, I wanted a better way to browse these bills. I built a scraper that pulls all of the bills off the website, cross references them with House and Senate districts, and generates maps. Those maps turned out to be pretty useful, so I followed up with new ones in 2018 and 2020.
As we enter the 2023 legislative session, the maps below will be updated every day. If you spot any errors, or have suggestions, please contact me. And if daily updates aren’t enough for you, the ultimate policy wonk, follow the TXLegeBills bot for real time updates.