Using Texas Legislature Online (TLO)
Follow bills that have been filed from their introduction to signing or veto by using TLO. You can also look up how your elected officials voted on a particular bill or issue important to you.
Are you interested in tracking legislation in the Texas House and Senate? You can follow bills that have been filed from their introduction to signing or veto by using Texas Legislature Online (TLO).
You can also look up how your elected officials voted on a particular bill so you can evaluate their job performance and make sure they are voting according to your Conservative principles and the Republican Party of Texas Legislative Priorities.
How To Use TLO
Visit https://capitol.texas.gov/Home.aspx. The site works best with the following browsers: Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari.
Set up an account by clicking on ‘Login’ in the upper right corner. You will then be taken to the login page and under the Username/Password window, you will see ‘New User’. That will take you to a page where you can create your own login.
Search for bills on the Home page by going to ‘Search Legislation’ at the top of the middle column and entering key words or a bill number, if you have one.
For instance, if you are looking for bills on ‘election integrity’, you can search those key words. If no documents are found, you can simply search for ‘elections’ and a list of bills will come up that you can review to find the bills you would like to follow.
SB indicates a Senate Bill and HB indicates a House Bill.
TIP: Visit our Legislative Alerts page to find lists of bills our Legislative Committee is currently following and opportunities to take action.
To the left of each bill listing, there is a small Texas logo. Click on that logo to access the bill’s History, Actions, Text, or Bill List. Select ‘Text’ to read the text of the bill. By selecting ‘Bill List’ you can even create lists of bills that you want to track.
Visit the ‘My TLO’ link that is just to the right of the ‘Home’ button as another way to create bill lists. By going to the ‘Alerts’ feature on that page, you can sign up to receive email notifications on activity occurring on bills that interest you.
Be advised, however, that it is not necessarily a good idea to select alerts for all activity on any given bill lest your email in-box be overwhelmed with notifications. Selections such as ‘Scheduled for Hearing’, ‘Reported Out of Committee’, and ‘Calendar Action’ are examples of actions you may want to track.
Look Up How Your Legislators Voted
It’s important to review how your legislators vote on bills that are important to you. This allows you to make informed decisions when the Primary Election rolls around. Did they work hard to pass bills that support the Republican Party of Texas Legislative Priorities? Do you want to keep your current elected representatives or replace them with someone who will vote according to conservative principles?
Here’s how to view how your elected representatives voted:
Follow the instructions in the “How To Use TLO” section above to locate bills of interest to you.
Once you have located a bill on TLO, click on ‘Actions’ and scan down the page looking for vote actions. If a record vote was taken, a “Record Vote” action will be noted.
For a House record vote, there will also be the abbreviation “RV” and a record number. If the action was a Senate vote action, a “Record Vote” or “Vote Recorded in Journal” action is highlighted.
If the journal for that day is not yet available, a message to that effect will display. Once the journal is available, the link will take you directly to the journal page that contains the vote information.
Note: Vote information on bills is included in the House or Senate journal. The votes of individual Representatives and Senators are available only if (1) a record vote is requested at the time the vote takes place; or (2) when a record vote has not been taken, a member registers, within a specified time limit, a request to have his or her vote recorded in the journal.
TIP: Another way to evaluate your elected representatives is by looking at the bills they authored and filed. Did they file bills on issues important to you? Check out the bills filed by your Texas lawmakers by visiting our State Legislators Progress Report.
There are many more features on the TLO website, but these are the features you are most likely to use.
Revised 07-2023