“I was not overly inspired,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said with a sigh. “It was a long list of things that President Biden seeks to try to do his first year of his term. So I think he wanted to make sure all the ins and outs of his various plans. Murkowski and other Republicans were not swept away by Biden’s praise of a $568 billion Republican infrastructure spending plan, which several prominent Democrats have already criticized as inadequate... “I was looking for more of an uplift and an outreach on the bipartisan note that we heard from the inauguration speech and didn’t necessarily hear that,” Murkowski said. “The things he outlined didn’t give us a lot to grab onto as Republicans. “We’ll see how it unfolds going forward … but it’s just hard when you have pretty expansive spending on top of spending with the only way to pay for it is to go after the issue of taxes,” she said. “I think it makes it very difficult for it to be truly bipartisan.”