The Texas Legislature is a bicameral legislative body with two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The presiding officer of the Texas House is the Speaker of the House, who is selected at the opening of each session by a majority vote of the members. The presiding officer of the Texas Senate is the lieutenant governor, who is chosen in a statewide partisan election to serve a four-year term. The legislature meets in regular session every two years during odd-numbered years. The legislature consists of 181 members, with 150 members in the House who serve two-year terms and thirty-one members in the Senate whose terms are four years long. Members are chosen in single-member district elections where only one winner of each race is seated in the legislature. Legislators in Texas are part of a hybrid institution, where they are somewhat citizen legislators and somewhat professionals in their legislative roles.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), members in each chamber must represent districts drawn with equal populations. Although the one person, one vote rule and the Voting Rights Act have increased equality among the electorate, the population in the legislature is very different demographically from the Texas population, where women and minorities are mathematically underrepresented. With the rise of partisanship in the legislature, redistricting has become an increasingly contentious process that not only pits the parties against each other, but also involves organized interests and the federal government to litigate what is a politically and constitutionally acceptable outcome to the process.