A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Democrats’ efforts to ratchet up the pressure on a few specific filibuster-loving Senate colleagues. Meanwhile, former President Trump has traded in his blog for the rally stage (and hopes of a late-summer coup?)

Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) told MSNBC’s Garrett Haake last night about what’s going on in the Senate. Basically he’s digging in. Not only no movement on the filibuster – but he seems to be saying no infrastructure bill via reconciliation either. Just to drop this out of Senate jargon, that means nothing on infrastructure that Republicans don’t approve. For clarity, Republicans seem locked into an infrastructure bill of around $200 billion – just over 1/10 the size Biden originally proposed. And they want to fund that by clawing back COVID relief money.

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Definitely take a moment to read Matt Shuham’s new piece on Proud Boys and other violent paramilitary groups now contending to control county Republican parties across the country. This example is about the situation around Portland, Oregon. But it’s part of a much larger story across the country, and particularly in the western United States. I wrote a couple weeks ago about a similar situation in Nevada. Definitely read and if you can share Matt’s piece.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s dozen years as Israel’s Prime Minister are most likely coming to an end. The new government should be sworn in sometime next week. But it’s still not a done deal because Netanyahu and many of his supporters view his removal from office – even by a unity government led by one of his former proteges – as existential. I’ve mentioned several times the January 6th analogy. But every political system has different mechanisms and every country has a unique political culture. So how could Netanyahu manage to remain in power either by norm-busting but still technically legitimate means or by extra-legal and extra-constitutional means?

Let’s start with the central fact: For the moment the new government is only a proposed government. To come formally into power it must be approved by a vote of 61 members of the Knesset, the country’s parliament. The coalition has to keep everyone on board for several days so they cast those 61 votes.

Wild details here about the situation in Mar-a-Lago. Ex-President Trump apparently spends his days channel surfing looking for any new news about the Arizona “audit”. He will appear at a rally next week in which he’ll be introduced as the “real president”.

By rights, it’s over and in effect it probably is over. Last night Israel’s opposition finalized and formally agreed to create a coalition government that will remove Benjamin Netanyahu from power. The coalition stretches from the right to the left and includes an Arab Israeli Islamist party. The architect of the new government is opposition leader Yair Lapid, whose deftness, patience and self-abnegation in this effort is really hard to capture or overstate. He has the signed document, which will make the right-wing Naftali Bennett Prime Minister for the government’s first two years, and he’s brought that to the country’s President. In the Israeli system, that’s it, all but the formality of the parties who just agreed to the deal voting it into power in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

But Netanyahu isn’t letting go.

Literally in the final hour, members of the so-called ‘change coalition’ have finalized an agreement to form a coalition government and presented it to the President. Caretaker Prime Minister Netanyahu has one more card to play but it’s hope and against hope and veering increasingly into Jan 6th territory. A Netanyahu ally, Yariv Levin, is the Speaker of the Knesset. And he and Netanyahu’s supporters have said he will simply refuse to hold the vote that confirms the new government. That is not really a thing. It’s pretty close to the Israeli system’s version of refusing to accept the electoral college ballots. It’s not clear how long he can he do that legally. Some have said he could conceivably delay for as long as a week. To what end? The coalition is so fragile that the hope is that a few more days might break it apart. Then Netanyahu gets to remain perpetual Prime Minister.

Really, though, this almost certainly means Netanyahu is through. Or at least through as the incumbent Prime Minister. The reality of the situation may lead to them jettisoning that plan.

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Yesterday we held an Inside Briefing with Paul Krugman in which we discussed pretty much all the economic policy questions (and the political debates growing out of them) of the early Biden presidency. We talk about the Biden infrastructure plan, inflation, chronic under-investment, Larry Summers, whether deficits matter and more.

If you’re a member, you can watch our discussion after the jump. I think you’ll enjoy it.

By now you’ve likely seen new reporting from the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman: Former President Trump is telling people that he expects he will be “reinstated” to the presidency in August.

Remarkable. Ex-President Trump appears to have had a tantrum and shut down his blog. This appears to come after news reports that it was receiving only a tiny amount of traffic. It ran for about 30 days. Sad.