Column: Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are torching the Constitution to further their own presidential ambitions

In 1783, Russia’s Prince Grigory Potemkin, in an effort to dazzle Empress Catherine the Great, is said to have erected facades that looked like beautiful houses along her route when she visited his province. Historians have cast doubt on the tale, but the term “Potemkin village” has lived on, coming to mean a false front intended to impress the gullible. This week in Congress, we’ll see a novel application of the concept: a Potemkin coup d’etat — an elaborate farce constructed to convince pro-Trump voters not only that the presidential election was rigged (it wasn’t), but that the president’s loyalists on Capitol Hill are mounting a heroic attempt to overturn it. Even the ringleaders of the...