Click here for an updated look at fundraising parties for members of the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee, which approved a massive health care reform bill this morning on a party-line vote. As we wrote about previously, a number of these parties were hosted by health care lobbyists:

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We’ve found invitations for at least 28 parties this year for members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions, of which several can be linked directly to health care industry lobbyists. (This is part of a series we’ve been running on parties for members of key health care committees.) These include:

• Nine lobbyists from the Podesta Group broke from their boss, Tony Podesta’s Democratic proclivities and invited donors to a breakfast with Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC). Among the companies some of them represent: Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Millenium Pharmaceuticals, Roche Group, and Genzyme Corp. Burr’s gotten more than $2 million in campaign contributions from the health care sector for his campaigns. (The nine lobbyists are: Sharon Cohen, Kimberley Fritts, Randall Gerard, Lauren Maddox, David Marin, Elizabeth Morra, John Scofield, John Shank, and Missi Tessier.)
• A half dozen lobbyists for the firm Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc.–Jamie Brown, Colette Desmarais, Bruce Mehlman, Elise Pickering, Dean Rosen, and Alex Vogel–planned a fundraising breakfast on March 10 for Sen. Johnny Isakson. Their clients include Abbott Laboratories, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. Isakson has collected more than $855,000 in campaign contributions from health care interests for his campaigns.
• Back in February, lobbyists for Fabiani & Co. organized another Isakson fundraiser, this one featuring “special guest” –Sen. Burr. Jim Fabiani and Stephen Conafay represent such clients as Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Braincells Inc., and Acorda Therapeutics.

[Thanks to intern Josh Heath who helped research this post.]

Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) is finding herself in the “fight for her life,”  in defending her seat against Democratic challenger Kay Hagan says the U.S. News & World Report. Her problem, reports the American Spectator, is that she’s spent most of her time in D.C. rather than North Carolina, and that she’s done a poor job of constitutent services.

Dole, however, has done a decent job of partying. Our Party Time database shows nine fundraising parties for the senator this year, all but two of them in Washington, DC.  (We previously blogged here about an August party for Dole sponsored by several timber PACs.) And of those two non-DC events, one was in Georgia and the other in New York City.

The deep connections that Dole enjoys thanks to her extensive GOP pedigree–she served in two cabinet posts and of course is married to former Senator Bob Dole (R-KS)–is evident when you dig into the meat of the invitations.

The Georgia party was hosted by several Republican Georgia elected officials: Governor Sonny Perdue, Secretary of State Karen Handel, and Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson. The venue: the home of Oscar and Virginia Persons. Oscar Persons is a partner at Alston & Bird, a legal and lobbying firm which also happens to employ Sen. Dole’s husband, former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), as well as former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD).

The New York party in April also featured a former senator as a draw, in this case former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato. (The former Republican senator from New York now lobbies for Park Strategies.) Bob Giuffra and his wife, Joyce, also hosted. Bob is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, the venue for the event, where he specializes in securities and white collar crime. Another host, George T. Conway III, is most well known for his reported involvement in the Paula Jones case back in the late 1990s. His firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, is famous for representing the tobacco giant Philip Morris when the company was sued, along with other tobacco companies, by the U.S. government for deciving the American public about the health effects of tobacco. (Tobacco, of course, is a big industry in North Carolina.)

We don’t have any invitations in our database for Hagan, Dole’s challenger. This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t party too. It only means that we haven’t received any of the invitations. That’s why we always encourage our readers to send us any invitations for congressional fundraisers that come their way.