On Wednesday I asked two state senators to respond to what my site says about them. One of them did. A single sentence in her answer sent me back to the Legislature’s own record, and the record showed that my page had the order of events wrong.
This site has a rule: before a page says something about a named person, we ask that person, and whatever comes back gets published in full. It is easy to treat that rule as a courtesy. This week it turned out to be the most useful thing the site does, because the person I asked knew something about my page that I didn’t.
Nebraska legalized medical cannabis by vote in 2024. A patient needs a written recommendation from a health care practitioner. LB933, from Sen. John Cavanaugh, would have protected the practitioners who write one. In April it was passed over and died for the session. During the debate, Sen. Kathleen Kauth offered an amendment adding provisions of her own bill, LB732, on hormones and puberty blockers for minors.
My page about it is the Nebraska medical cannabis dates page. It quotes Sen. Cavanaugh (“hijacked”) and the head of the advocacy group that ran the ballot campaign (“poison pill”). It says plainly that those are their words, not ours. On September 9 I wrote to both senators, described exactly what the page says, and offered each of them the same thing: tell me what you think, or tell me what’s wrong, and it goes up in full.
Request sent to Sen. Kauth. Sen. Cavanaugh’s went the same morning.
Sen. Kauth replies and asks to see the whole section. I send it word for word that afternoon.
Her statement arrives. She had been out of town the day before.
Statement published in full. One claim checked. My page corrected.
Her statement is her view of what happened and why. Most of it is hers to make, and I am not going to argue with it here. But one sentence in it was a plain factual claim, the kind a record can settle:
Germane means on-topic enough to be attached to a bill under the Legislature’s rules. My page didn’t mention any ruling on that. It called LB732 “unrelated to cannabis” in my own voice.
So I went to the Legislature’s own news service, the Unicameral Update, and read its account of the day LB933 died. It confirms her claim: Sen. George Dungan of Lincoln challenged the amendment as not germane, and the challenge was unsuccessful. (The Nebraska Examiner reports the presiding senator that day was Sen. Myron Dorn.)
That would have been a one-line fix. Then I read the rest of the Legislature’s account.
| My page said | The Legislature’s record says | |
|---|---|---|
| Kauth attached LB732, then Cavanaugh’s amendment failed 20–20 | Cavanaugh’s amendment failed 20–20 first. Then two other amendments were adopted, including one of Kauth’s on professional judgment. Then she offered LB732. | WRONG ORDER |
| LB732 was attached | It was offered and never voted on. The Legislature moved on “without voting on the bill or the pending amendments.” | WRONG WORD |
| Nothing about a germaneness ruling. LB732 called “unrelated to cannabis” | A germaneness challenge was made, and it was unsuccessful. | LEFT OUT |
The first row is the one that bothers me most. Put the tie vote after LB732 and a reader naturally takes it as a reaction to LB732. I even wrote, right under the table, that twenty senators declining to support Cavanaugh’s amendment was “not one person’s doing.” That was meant to be fair to her. But it sat on top of the wrong order, so it tied her amendment to a vote that happened before it existed.
How it happened: I built the sequence from news coverage, which summarized the day in a few sentences. The Legislature’s own step-by-step account was available the whole time. I read the summary instead of the record. That is the exact mistake this site tells everyone else not to make.
The page now carries her statement in full and unedited, in its own box, with nothing from me underneath it. The table was rebuilt from the Legislature’s account, one amendment per row, in order, with every vote count. Above it is a box marked CORRECTED — 2026-09-11 that quotes what the table used to say, so anyone can see the before and after. My pre-meeting post from this morning had the same wrong sentence, and it now has a dated note too.
Here is what the correction does not do:
Sen. Kauth’s statement describes Sen. Cavanaugh’s decision to pull his bill. So the same afternoon, I wrote to his office to tell him it was published, what the correction says, and that the offer I made him on September 9 still stands: anything he sends goes up in full, in the same kind of box, with the same room.
As of this post, he hasn’t replied. The first request is two days old, and legislative offices run thin between sessions. That silence is a date, not a verdict.
That’s also why this post quotes only the one sentence I checked from Sen. Kauth’s statement rather than all of it. Her full words are on the dates page, one click away. If this post reprinted her whole statement while his side is still empty, the blog would be giving one senator more room than the other, and a site can pick a side by layout just as easily as by adjective.
I used to think the point of asking was fairness: give people a chance to respond before you publish something about them. It is that. But this week it was also just better research. The person named on my page read it more closely than anyone else would, because it was about her, and she pointed at the one fact I had skipped.
Would you believe me if I told you the most useful fact-check this site has had came from a person it was writing about? Ask the people you write about. Sometimes they tell you where to look.