The Farm Bill sets farm and food policy for all Americans. And the impact of the bill doesn't just stop at the border. The Farm Bill, as the Washingon Post noted, impacts everyone from American taxpayers to African farmers.

So, it should be no surprise that an unprecedented number of Americans (and even a few Canadians) are trying to shape a bill that dramatically impacts our health, hunger, energy, environmental, trade and rural challenges.

Doctors fighting obesity, black farmers fighting a legacy of USDA discrimination, environmentalists fighting sprawl, CEOs fighting retaliatory tariffs, county executives fighting rural poverty, pastors fighting hunger — a broad and unprecedented alliance has formed to make sure the farm bill meets the needs of all Americans.

But the House Agriculture Committee — which largely represents 20 congressional districts that collect more than half of all farm spending — is concerned that ordinary Americans might have something to say about how their food is produced. The nerve of those people!!

One member of the Committee recently said he was "frightened" that a majority of legislators might actually decide the future of farm and food policy. Letting a majority of legislators make such decisions would be "a real phsyical threat" to Americans. What's more, reforming farm subsidies to help more farmers and meet other pressing challenges, such as feeding the hungry or helping the environment, would be "a threat to rural America, a threat to every consumer, a threat to the nutrition of the whole, entire world."

The Ruminant can imagine King George saying the same thing about those crazy American revolutionaries.

Fortunately, the framers did not include Committees — not even the House Agriculture Committee! — in the Constitution. A lot of those framers were farmers, and they somehow managed to declare independence, fight a revolution, and launch the Republic — all without farm subsidies. And they had to do all that while wearing funny wigs!!!

The framers actually made it the job of the whole Congress to decide the future of farm and food policies — and for good reason. Many of the framers were the men who risked their lives to declare their independence from tyranny. So, they thoughtfully crafted a system of government that would prohibit tyranny by a few special interests.

Here's hoping the Congress will declare its independence from lobbyists who claim to be the "voice of agriculture" but advance policies that support less than 10 percent of America's farmers.