Companies, associations and the lobbyists employed by them contributed almost $19 million to charities in honor of federal officials last year, the vast majority of it for members of Congress, according to a new report I wrote over on the Reporting Group blog. The report parsed messy disclosures that all lobbying entities have to file every six months ever since 2008, when a law aimed at shining a light on lobbyist influence in Washington came into effect.

To find out which lawmakers and cabinet members were honored most, or to see which interests paid the most in honorary expenses last year, search the interactive graphic below. You can even filter the graphic for lawmakers from your home state.

To embed the graphic on your site, just use this code: <iframe frameborder="0" height="605" scrolling="no" src="http://assets.sunlightfoundation.com/honorees_update/index.html" style="overflow: hidden; margin=10px" width="590"></iframe>

One interesting finding is that the amount of honorary contributions has declined ever since 2009.  The campaign finance lawyer I spoke with, Brett Kappel, said that transparency has made lawmakers less likely to ask for donations--especially when it comes to their own charities--and companies are less likely to give if they are publicly scrutinized. Still, the companies continue the honorary giving, doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to some lawmakers' pet causes, and for charity galas where lawmakers receive awards. Even though it goes to good causes, it also gives them good access to powerful officials--sometimes as good as sitting at the same dinner table.

The above graph also shows that most of the money went to honoring lawmakers. Here is the 2011 breakdown:

• Individual members of Congress: $9.6 million
• Congressional caucuses or delegations: $5.7 million
• Executive branch officials: $3.5 million
• Legislative branch staff and federal candidates: $158,000

It was also striking to discover how narrow the disclosure rules are. There are plenty of ways to honor lawmakers without having to disclose that you did, and you can read all about them in the "Loopholes" section of the report.

Another important part of the story is just how unfriendly the data is. As with a lot of congressional ethics data, this kind is messy. It may be because Congress writes rules for itself that the end result is information that takes a lot of time and effort to make any sense of. It took weeks to standardize the names of officials and delete duplicated and erroneous reports, and that's after already being familiar with the data after writing a similar report last year.

The report focuses on the increased honorary giving by lobbying giants Google and General Motors. It also explores the connections between the cosmetics industry and a charity associated with Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah.

To read more details about how the analysis was done, head here.

(Graphics by Jacob Fenton and Kevin Koehler)

Companies, politicians, celebrities and journalists have all taken to Twitter to promote their brands. But based on a search of Twitter’s API for the names of thousands of registered lobbyists, as well as interviews, lobbyists have been a bit slower to join the Twitter party.

However, some lobbyists’ tweets reveal insider tidbits about what they are monitoring, who they are influencing, and how Washington works, all in real-time.

We have compiled a list of lobbyists using Twitter on the @sunfoundation account so citizens can follow what some of them are up to. This list, which includes over 200 lobbyists, is only a sample of lobbyists using the service and we hope to add more.

How did we make the list? By querying Twitter’s API, we tried to match the names of thousands of registered lobbyists from Center for Responsive Politics data with Twitter user names. Because Twitter only allows a limited number of queries each day, matches were only attempted for about one fourth of the over 15,000 lobbyists that were registered in 2009 or 2010. When a lobbyist’s name matched a Twitter user name, and when more biographical data matched the details in the Twitter profile, the account was included in our list. Then, we supplemented the list by searching Twitter for lobbyists we are familiar with and top spending lobbying firms.

In the process, we found that, amidst a sea of quotidian, what-I’m-eating-for-dinner tweets, sometimes lobbyists provide a real-time look into how they might be influencing members of Congress.

For instance, one lobbyist, Rob Nichols, the president of the influential Financial Services Forum, tweeted live from a September charity event featuring the Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

The tweet provided a rare, real-time glimpse into the details of a lobbyist attending a lawmaker’s pet charity event. Nichols said he was there as a guest of a friend and did not donate, according to FSF spokesperson Jen Scungio.

Other lobbyists tweet about their access to high-ranking lawmakers. In one case, a meat industry lobbyist revealed that he has even gone hunting with one.

Michael Formica, the chief environmental counsel for the National Pork Producers Council, was defending Congressman Ryan, the chair of the House Budget Committee, after New York Times columnist Frank Bruni accused him and other politicians of projecting themselves as ordinary, outside-the-beltway Americans to be more appealing.

Formica said he was on Ryan’s team at the annual shoot-out fundraiser for the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation a few years ago, which the NPPC and other entities sponsor.

“The one time I shot with him, he was by far the best Republican shot. We talked about hunting and he legitimately knew what he was saying and what he was doing,” Formica said.

Although the NPCC lobbies Congress, Formica himself does not, he said.

“I don’t do lobbying. I’m a lawyer and I deal with EPA. It annoys me that they list me as a lobbyist.”

On Twitter at least, some lobbyists aren’t so shy. Gregg Hartley, the senior Republican at lobbying powerhouse Cassidy and Associates, tweeted about the great view from the House Majority Leader’s office, running into GOP operative Karl Rove, and which lawmakers he’s throwing fundraisers for. That is, until he closed his account some months ago, making his past tweets unavailable (we saved some).

Still other lobbyists have even revealed when they’re going to a Capitol Hill hearing. Soon after it was announced that there would be a hearing on regulating online poker Oct. 25, Peter Dugas, a financial services, energy and gaming lobbyist, tweeted:

Dugas, who used to lobby for MGM Resorts International, which is pushing to lift the federal online poker ban, cautioned that such tweets require context. “It’s always important to have some context why you’re going. People may assume that I have a client in online gaming if I’m going.” He added, “In reality I’m only going because I have a personal interest in the issue.”

Asked if Twitter or other social media could be used by lobbyists to disclose who they are meeting with in real-time, Dugas responded, over Twitter of course, that perhaps they could “check-in on Four Square linked to LD-2.”

He later said that lobbyists could use the locational service to report with whom they are meeting and on whose behalf. That information could be linked to their lobbying disclosure form, called the LD-2. Those forms currently require lobbyists to indicate federal agencies or legislative bodies they contact—for example, the Internal Revenue Service or the House—and not list individuals within those bodies that they contacted.

Politically Opinionated Lobbyists

Lobbyists tend to use Twitter more as an outlet for their political views than a tool for disclosure. The bombastic and conservative John Feehery, the president of communications at Quinn Gillespie, tweets out links to his blog, The Feehery Theory.

From time to time those opinions coincide with his clients’ issues. While representing the Interactive Gaming Council (he no longer does), he pushed for the legalization of online poker on his blog, writing, “If people want to engage in an activity that is personal in nature, whether that activity is drinking booze, smoking pot or playing cards online, the market is going to serve those people.”

“Sometimes I’m particularly incensed by something that my clients are dealing with and I identify something in my blog,” Feehery, who blogged favorably about legalizing and regulating online poker after he stopped representing the Interactive Gaming Council, said.

Dena Battle, a tax lobbyist with Capitol Counsel, routinely criticizes President Obama.

Battle lobbies for nearly four dozen entities, including the American Petroleum Institute, the National Business Aviation Association and phRma. All three industries backed by these trade groups—oil, corporate jets, and the pharmaceutical industry—have been a target of proposed tax increases under the Obama Administration.

Susann Edwards, a Cassidy & Associates lobbyist, identifies herself on her Twitter bio as one of a “dying breed of moderate Democrats.” But her tweets tended to reveal more about her musical tastes than her work for the firm—she is apparently a fan of late 1990s hip-hop.

Tweeting for business

As both a communications professional and a lobbyist, Feehery sees the potential for lobbyists to make use of both Twitter and Facebook in the influence business.

“To be an effective advocate you have to use social media. Whether you call yourself a lobbyist, a public affairs person or a strategist, if you don’t include social media in your offering you’re just not really playing,” he said.

Yet there are hurdles for lobbyists to jump over, he said. “Most lobbyists are policy people…they typically don’t do that in social media world—typically in one-on-one communications,” Feehery said. “I don’t think lobbyists are going to use Twitter per se because I don’t think lobbyists understand public communications and how to communicate to a wider audience.”

Lobbying firms are lagging behind on the social media, said Alex Bronstein-Moffly, an online content manager at First Street, a research platform that serves K Street. “Spitting it out for the universe to see on Twitter" is counterintuitive for them, as they value the personal relationships gained from decades on Capitol Hill. They are mostly using Twitter for personal reasons and to monitor news, he added.

Twitter helped Katherine Hamilton, also a lobbyist at Quinn Gillespie and an expert on smart grid technology, enhance her credibility in her field.

“If you are a thought leader and you establish yourself through a blog, through tweeting, any kind of social media, you can present that as an asset to attract clients,” Hamilton said.

She started using it in 2009 or 2010, she recalls, as the president of GridWise Alliance. When she started lobbying for Quinn Gillespie earlier this year, she also started a smart grid blog, which she links to on Twitter. Most of her tweets—she says she is lucky to tweet once per day—are policy-related.

Careful tweeting?

Most lobbying firms we called would not comment as to whether they have guidelines for how their employees should behave on social media sites. Feehery said he did not know if Quinn Gillespie has one but he maintained that the firm does not muzzle its lobbyists.

“We encourage our folks to be part of the conversation as long as they are respectful,” Feehery said.

“I think that the most important thing is honesty. Being honest and identifying yourself and making people know when you are speaking on your own behalf," he added.

Dugas used to be able to be a bit less cautious, he said, because he worked at lobbying firm. He recently joined a law firm that also lobbies.

“Since I’ve joined it, because we are a law firm, I’m much more sensitive to my activities and the conversation that I discuss on a social network just out of an abundance of caution,” Dugas said.

Lobbying may be lagging behind other industries in its use of Twitter, as lobbyists favor more confidential communications, but that is not the case for at least one influential, veteran K Street insider.

Gregg Hartley, the vice chairman and chief operating officer at Cassidy & Associates and a longtime GOP political fundraiser, tweeted directly at legislators, boasted of the fundraisers he threw for them, and even revealed when he was lobbying them on a particular issue—at least when he chose to share that information.

Hartley closed his Twitter account around Sept. 1, according to the lobby shop’s spokesman, but his tweets from early April until his most recent one in late July were saved in an RSS Reader*. During that time, many of the lawmakers he mentioned meeting with on Twitter received donations from him. In total, between March and August, Hartley contributed to 19 Republican campaigns or committees, totaling $29,500, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Almost all of his tweets prior to April, which dated back to at least 2009, are no longer available because he deleted his account.

Hartley, who was the chief of staff to Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., when the latter, as the House Majority Whip, was viewed as the GOP’s K Street point man, lobbies for over two dozen companies and associations. He often tweeted when pressing lawmakers to favor a range of issues—from the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, to the legalization of online poker, to improving U.S.-Bangladesh relations.

“If you want to learn how Washington works, Gregg Hartley would be an expert,” said Missouri Democratic political consultant Richard Martin, who has known of Hartley for years, as both have been working on opposite sides of the aisle in Missouri. Hartley is a prolific GOP fundraiser, often hosting events for candidates in Washington. He is also unabashed about who he is targeting. In April, he sent out a blast email to PACs and insiders in Washington with a list of over a dozen lawmakers who he wanted to contribute to in June and “later this year,” according to an email obtained by PoliticalPartyTime.org.

Tweeting at a Tea Party freshman

From his Twitter account, Hartley often tweeted at members of Congress. Between April and June, Hartley mentioned one such congressman—Tea Party favorite Billy Long, R-Mo., seven times on Twitter.

“Billy Long would be a tough nut to crack. I’m sure he’s a pretty anti-Washington guy. It’s gonna take a few years before he learns the ways of Washington and becomes apart of that city. He may never, he may decide not to. But my guess is, he may follow in Roy Blunt’s footsteps and who better to learn from than Gregg Hartley on how to do that,” Martin said.

A spokesman for Cassidy & Associates, Tom Anderson, did not respond to a request for an interview with Hartley, and multiple direct calls to Hartley were not returned. Long’s office did not respond to a phone message or email requesting comment for this article.

During the threat of a government shutdown in April, Hartley directly lobbied Long on Twitter, recommending that he focus on long-term budget cuts.

Hartley followed those tweets up with cash. First he tweeted about an event that appeared to be a fundraiser:

About a month later, Long’s campaign deposited a $1,000 check from Hartley, according to CRP. Then, on June 3, after Hartley took a break from Twitter for a few weeks, the lobbyist tweeted that Long noticed his absence. That same day, he tweeted about eating dinner with the congressman. On June 15, he complimented Long’s auctioneering skills; the congressman closed his auction business before joining Congress but was raising money for charity that evening.

Yet his access to lawmakers reaches far beyond the freshman class.

That lunch with Cantor was soon followed by a $2,500 donation to Cantor’s leadership PAC, which reported receiving it days after the lunch.

That was also Hartley’s penultimate tweet. Anderson said that Hartley closed it to focus on his work.

Betting on Online Poker

In late June, just before a Texas congressman introduced legislation to legalize online poker, Hartley, one of the dozens of lobbyists pushing to legalize online poker or gambling on the Hill, started frequently tweeting about the subject. First he was in Las Vegas with his client MGM Resorts International, then he was in the “war room,” then he applauded the bill soon after it was introduced on June 24:

Over the following weeks, he tweeted about meetings on Capitol Hill with other members of Congress. By early August, the bill had a total of 25 co-sponsors. A few days later, he had access to Barton:

Over a week later, he tweeted about a July 8 meeting with Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., a key player in the debate, and the third biggest recipient of donations from the casino and gaming industry for the 2012 election cycle, according to CRP.

Heck hadn’t sponsored the bill yet. But he did on July 19.

Heck’s press secretary Darren Littell confirmed that a meeting took place in the week of July 4, but said that no one meeting was the “nail in the coffin” to gain Heck’s support and, if a sponsorship followed a meeting with Hartley, it was “purely coincidental.”

“I think there were some folks that were supportive of it and some that had reservations about it. We listened to them, we got their input and feedback. ...It’s kind of like with any issues, it’s never simple, especially with something as complicated as online gaming,” Littell said.

Hartley appeared to be courting other House freshman to support the bill too.

Hartley’s disclosure of meetings with congressmen is a rarity.

“As far as the lobbying community, it’s an extremely small percentage of people that are using that for that purpose and I think the reason why is a) they don’t want to talk about what they’re doing because they’re not proud of it or because they don’t want to release their clients’ business like any good practitioners,” said John Feehery, the president of communications for Quinn Gillespie.

Peter Dugas, a lobbyist at Clark Hill, said such revealing tweets might be misleading. If a lobbyist with multiple clients tweets about a meeting with a member of Congress, the wrong client may think his or her issue was being discussed. He also noted that, if accurate, opposing lobbyists can use the information to their advantage.

Misleading or not, Hartley’s twitter feed provided a revealing, 140-character view into the workings of one lobbyist, until his tweeting stopped.

*The dates of Hartley's tweets correspond to the date and time they were stored in Google Reader, which might not be exactly the same as when they were tweeted. In particular, a slew of tweets were stored on April 11 (including the first two mentioned in this article) because the RSS Reader started capturing tweets that day.

This morning, the House voted on an amendment to slash the budget of Congress’s independent ethics panel by 40 percent.

By our tally so far, nearly half* of the members of Congress who have been probed by the Office of Congressional Ethics either voted to slash the panel’s budget, voted present or did not vote.

10 11 of the 26 current voting members of Congress (Del. Donna Christensen, D-V.I. cannot vote on the House floor) who have been probed voted to slash the budget. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., voted “present” and G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., did not vote.

So far, we have identified 34 members of Congress who have been under investigation by the OCE. In total, an OCE spokeswoman said it has investigated 82 members. Not all of these members have been publicly disclosed and the OCE does not comment on investigations until they’ve been referred to the House Ethics Committee, a panel made up of members of Congress with the power to punish lawmakers, the spokeswoman said.

As we find more members of Congress investigated by the OCE throughout the day, we will update our list of lawmakers below.

So far, it appears that 24 members of Congress have been referred for further review to the House Ethics Committee by the OCE. This includes 21 cases which have been publicly disclosed by the OCE. It also includes the cases of Reps. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y. and Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, whose reviews were recently announced by the House Ethics Committee. Finally, the 24 members include OCE's recommendation to review the alleged role that Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Ill., played in former Gov. Rod Blagojevich's corruption scandal. The Ethics Committee has deferred investigating that inquiry at the request of the Department of Justice.**

The amendment was introduced by Mel Watt, D-N.C., who was investigated, along with seven colleagues, by the OCE before the board cleared him of wrongdoing. In a letter to House colleagues before the vote, Watt wrote, “all of these members incurred substantial expenses and experienced unjustified damage to their reputations in the middle of an election, and one of them actually lost his campaign."

In all, 102 legislators voted to reduce the OCE’s funding and 302 voted against the measure.

Interestingly, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who is being investigated by the panel despite OCE’s alleged mishandling of her case, voted against undercutting the board. Rep. Charlie Rangel, who was ultimately censured by his peers last December voted ‘nay’ as well.

24 of the 29 Democrats who voted to slash OCE funding are members of Congressional Black Caucus. CBC members have repeatedly criticized the OCE and introduced legislation to curtail its powers.

*note: The original post mistakenly counted Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Ill., among those voting for the amendment. He voted against it.

**clarification: The original post said that 26 cases had been referred to the House Ethics Committee. That number is correct, but only 24 of these cases are known to be members of Congress. Two of these cases are regarding House staffers Michael Collins and Greg Hill.

Last Friday, the House passed a measure that aims to block any executive order regarding disclosure of political donations.

Eighteen House Democrats joined almost every Republican to support the amendment, while another eight Democrats did not vote at all. All other Democrats opposed it. The measure was attached to an energy and water appropriations bill and would prohibit the use of any funding to implement an Obama administration effort to require more information on campaign spending.

On average, the 18 Democrats House members received about 63 percent of their campaign contributions from corporate sources for the 2010 election, according to an analysis of Center for Responsive Politics data. This was calculated by totaling each members’ donations from 14 13 sectors (such as defense and finance) identified by CRP but excluding donations from the following sectors: lawyers and lobbyists, Labor, ideological or single-issue groups and groups labeled ‘other.’

Of the 18 congressmen, Reps. Mike Ross, Jim Matheson, and Colin Peterson relied most on corporate PACs and employees during the last election, taking in nearly 85 percent from those sources. Reps. Henry Cuellar and Dan Boren received nearly 80 percent of their campaign cash from corporate sources.

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The amendment they voted for sought to preempt an Obama administration effort, first disclosed in April, to issue an executive order that would require all government contractors to disclose their political contributions, including those to organizations that don't disclose their donors. It was meant as a response to Citizens United v. FEC, where the Supreme Court ruled to remove restrictions on corporations’ expenditures in elections.

That ruling opened the floodgates for some undisclosed election spending. Nonprofit organizations can now receive corporate donations and make independent expenditures on elections without reporting their donors to the Federal Election Commission. Crossroads GPS spent $15 million opposing Democratic candidates last election; because it's organized as a section 501(c)4 committee, it's not required to disclose its donors. Similarly, because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a 501(c)6 organization, it doesn't have to disclose its donors, despite spending more than $32 million in the 2010 cycle to influence elections.

Democrats have gotten into the act as well, recently launching Priorities USA Action, a 501(c)4 organization that was co-founded by former White House spokesman Bill Burton.

Obama's executive order would bring some unknown corporate donations to nonprofits into the public realm. It would also make the donations of the nation’s largest union, AFL-CIO, known, because it has small contracts with the Department of Labor.

Facing a battle with the Peruvian government over a smelting operation that has caused severe environmental damage to a town in the Andean mountains, the Renco Group and its owner, billionaire Ira Rennert, assembled a formidable lobbying team in a matter of months that includes eight former government officials from five different Washington firms, and has succeeded in getting members of Congress from both parties and the Obama administration to aid it in its cause.

Renco Group’s hiring spree, uncovered using Sunlight’s Lobbying Registration Tracker, shows how private interests strategically employ lobbyists with insider connections to current officials to influence public policy. However, because lobbyists are not required to disclose which members of Congress they’ve contacted, and because none of Renco Group’s lobbyists would comment for this story, we can only note the connections between the lobbyists and the members of Congress who acted on the company’s behalf.

Among its hires, the Renco Group retained the services of a pair of lobbyists with ties to Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., and House Financial Services Committee chairman Spencer Bachus, R-Ala. In January, both lawmakers wrote letters to the Treasury Department about Doe Run Peru (DRP), Renco’s subsidiary, and its dispute with the Peruvian government, Treasury letters responding to the congressmen show.

In February, eleven days after his former chief of staff, Kerry McKenney, registered to lobby on Renco’s behalf, Payne had a letter entered into the Congressional Record addressed to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which he expressed a “serious concern” about Lima’s treatment of Doe Run Peru and the Renco Group.

"Secretary Geithner has indicated that they have approached the Peruvian government about the issue," Laverne Alexander, Payne's current chief of staff, said.

At issue is a complicated financial and environmental dispute involving a metal smelter that began operations in 1922 in the town of La Oroya, Peru. The Blacksmith Institute, an organization that focuses on industrial pollution in the developing world, called La Oroya one of the ten most polluted places on earth in 2006—a 2005 study found that nearly all of the children in the town of 35,000 under six suffered from lead poisoning. When it purchased the facility in 1997, Renco promised to remediate some of the contamination, but has received numerous extensions from the Peruvian government, and has yet to complete the work.

The company claims that Lima has failed to uphold its own obligations under the environmental cleanup agreement that was part of the terms under which the smelter was sold to Renco.

The Renco Group is no stranger to environmental controversy—in 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency rated its MagCorp subsidiary, based in Utah, as one of the biggest polluters in the country, and in 2010, its Doe Run subsidiary, based in St. Louis, agreed to spend $65 million to bring the operations of its Missouri facilities into compliance with environmental regulations, and agreed to a $7 million civil penalty for breaking a series of environmental laws.

In the dispute with Peru, members of Congress sided with the company, and pressured the Treasury Department to do the same. In response to the letters from Bachus and Payne, Marisa Lago, the Assistant Treasury Secretary for International Markets and Development, wrote on February 15 that, “Our embassy has been in touch with the Government of Peru on a number of different occasions with respect to this case, emphasizing that we expect it to make a good faith effort to work with DRP to resolve the pending financial and environmental issues.”

Those issues are daunting. Operations at DRP’s smelter in La Oroya, Peru, have been shut down for two years as the company has unsuccessfully sought to borrow money to resume work there. Meanwhile, the Renco Group still faces a lawsuit filed on behalf of bondholders who allege the company misrepresented the environmental liabilities of its MagCorp subsidiary.

Lima’s bankruptcy agency is now considering whether to restructure the idle company or liquidate its assets; Doe Run Peru has filed its intent to commence arbitration through the U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement. That trade deal allows for a neutral resolution of disputes though an international arbitration court, a fact mentioned by Lago in her letters to Payne and Bachus.

In its lobbying effort, Renco Group hired Palmer C. Hamilton, a former Treasury official and banking lobbyist who hosted a fundraiser with and contributed $18,000 to the campaigns of fellow Alabaman Spencer Bachus. The company also hired former Ways and Means Chairman Jim McCrery, R-N.J., who, as ranking member in the 109th Congress, was instrumental in securing passage of the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement, and Timothy Keeler, the former chief of staff of the United States Trade Representative office, whose responsibilities included overseeing the implementation of free trade agreements. Over a span of 82 days beginning in November 2010, Renco Group hired eight former government officials working at five different Washington firms. So far, those firms have reported receiving $245,000 to lobby.

Renco Group’s headquarters are in New York, as is Fair Field, the largest mansion in the United States and the home of the company’s owner, billionaire Ira Rennert, ranked by Forbes in 2010 as the 144th wealthiest man in the world, with a fortune estimated at $5.3 billion.

For more on this story, read the complete report and background information at the Reporting Group site.

This is a cross-post with Political Party Time

There are some pre-State of the Union fundraisers happening on the Hill tonight.

The docket of events could start with a stiff drink alongside Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc. He will be attending “Martinis and Mayhem” at 5 p.m. at the Capitol Hill Club, his office confirmed. The shindig attempts to raise up to $1,000 per supporter for his campaign, according to the invitation.

At 6:30 p.m., two of Rep. Joe Barton’s, R-Texas, former top aides-turned influential lobbyists will be hosting a $1,500-per-PAC dinner at the townhouse of lobbyist Rick Murphy. One former aide, Bud Albright, was the staff director of the Energy and Commerce Committee while Barton was the chair. He recently became the man responsible for implementing CenterPoint Energy’s legislative agenda. The other lobbyist is Jeff MacKinnon, Barton’s former legislative director who has many telecom and energy clients.

Also hosting is health care lobbyist Jeff Kimbell, a former member of President George W. Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services transition team advisory committee.

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, a freshman and former outsider candidate who won the 2010 election with Tea Party support, will be eating dinner at a Trattoria Alberto fundraiser on the Hill at 6 p.m. The ask is $500 for individual donations and $1,000 for PAC donations.

Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., who is giving the Republican response to Obama’s speech, was supposed to hold a leadership PAC fundraiser tonight in D.C. but it’s been postponed for a date to be determined, according to his fundraising consultant. The event had been scheduled before he was tapped for the speech, the consultant said.