Take that, Republicans! We’ll see you one Cuban-American Harvard Law graduate who memorized the Constitution when he was in high school and raise you Mexican-American twins who went to Harvard Law and got elected mayor and state representative! The race for the Hispanic vote goes on, and we will try to avoid mentioning that virtually the only thing all three of these people have in common is an inability to speak fluent Spanish.

Texas money and Texas politicians helped create the Tea Party movement, and the state does tend to treasure the extreme. The current Republican state platform calls for an end to the teaching of “critical thinking” in public schools. In the Texas primary this week, a member of the State Supreme Court lost renomination to a former county judge who had made his name fighting for the right to work in a courtroom with a picture of the Ten Commandments on the wall and a monument to the Bible in the front yard.

There’s always been a strong antigovernment strain in Texas politics, which seems to have something to do with Texans being obsessed with the fact that their state was once an independent republic. “We are very proud of our Texas history,” Gov. Rick Perry once said. “People discuss and debate the issues of can we break ourselves into five states, can we secede, a lot of interesting things that I’m sure Oklahoma and Pennsylvania would love to be able to say about their states, but, the fact is, they can’t. Because they’re not Texas.” He was totally stunned when it turned out that nobody wanted to nominate him for president.

But even Perry was supporting Cruz’s opponent, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who represented the traditional Texas Republican business establishment. (Dewhurst himself has a Mitt Romney-sized fortune.) But he turned out to be a terrible debater and lethargic campaigner. His platform was basically the same as Cruz’s, although with a slightly shorter list of federal agencies to abolish.

Maybe the real answer to this and all the other Tea Party-over-establishment upsets is that the traditional Republican party is just burned out, and devoid of fresh faces. It’s either that or the golf course peril.