A congressional battle over pesticides is testing the Make America Healthy Again movement’s sway over Republicans.

A handful of MAHA-aligned House Republicans, along with Democrats, worked Tuesday to convince the House Rules Committee to strip language from the farm bill that protects pesticide producers from legal liability.

For MAHA to succeed, Republicans would have to buck their traditional alliances with the powerful agriculture industry. Companies like Bayer, which produce pesticides that include glyphosate, have aggressively lobbied to secure this liability shield and sidestep more aggressive labeling laws.

The provision, which bans consumers from suing pesticide makers for not disclosing cancer and health risks, as long as the companies are complying with federal regulations, is loathed by clean-food activists, who say it protects makers of toxic pesticides at the expense of Americans’ health.

Lawmakers on the Rules Committee will also vote on whether to give the Environmental Protection Agency a five-year extension to release a court-ordered safety review of all pesticides, which are reviewed every 15 years. Right now, that report is due roughly one month before the November midterm elections.

If the GOP-led Congress passes these industry-friendly policies, it would feed a growing sense of outrage among a group of Americans who are fans of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health movement, and have been increasingly dismayed by the administration’s posture towards glyphosate.

“The Trump administration made glyphosate a 2020 election issue,” Vani Hari, a Kennedy ally known as the “Food Babe,” told NOTUS.

Hari organized a rally Monday in front of the Supreme Court, where dozens of activists chanted “People versus poison” and waved signs saying “Bayer is poison” and “Accountability not immunity.”

Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Nancy Mace of South Carolina are among the Republicans who have offered amendments to strip parts of the pesticide provisions.

“I think Big Ag needs to be body checked,” Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy said in the Rules Committee meeting.

Still, there are many Republican voices defending the agricultural industry’s position. The House Agriculture Committee voted down an amendment to strip out the liability shield in March.

Its chairman, Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, told the Rules Committee he disagrees that the provision would protect bad actors and insisted glyphosate is safe when used as instructed.

“If they are in compliance with EPA standards, there’s nothing to sue about at that point because the science is proven,” Thompson said.

Democrats, who have largely been reluctant to embrace MAHA, overwhelmingly oppose protections for Bayer. Several lawmakers, including Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, joined prominent MAHA activists at the Monday rally at the Supreme Court.

The court was hearing oral arguments in a lawsuit from Bayer, which is attempting to shut down thousands of other lawsuits alleging it failed to warn users that the active ingredient in Roundup, the popular weed killer, causes cancer.

“I think this is the most unifying issue we’ve run into,” Del Bigtree, a former top political adviser to Kennedy, told NOTUS at the rally. “Talk to any medical freedom person. Odds are they eat organic, they read labels. Hard to imagine what issue is bigger than pesticides, herbicides on our food.”

Glyphosate has been at the center of a scientific and legal battle for more than a decade.

The EPA and regulatory agencies abroad have concluded it’s unlikely to be carcinogenic to humans when used according to label directions. Yet in 2015, the World Health Organization classified glyphosate as “probably” carcinogenic — a finding driven in part by studies linking heavy occupational exposure to increased rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Its rating from the WHO indicates it has limited or no evidence of the chemical being carcinogenic to humans, but sufficient evidence in animals.

The debate has grown murkier in recent months. A pivotal industry-funded study long cited in glyphosate’s defense was retracted late last year after evidence emerged that it had been ghostwritten by Monsanto scientists. A March symposium of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Cancer Institute and European institutions concluded the evidence of harm was strong enough to justify immediate regulatory action.

Farmers have warned that losing access to glyphosate would lead to a major increase in food costs and further instability for farmers already operating on tight margins, many of whom are facing bankruptcy.

Some in the industry are concerned that if Bayer continues to face lawsuits, it would discontinue selling the product in the United States, forcing farmers to rely on Chinese manufacturers instead. Bayer’s CEO said last year that the company may not sell the product for much longer.

“We’re pretty much reaching the end of the road,” Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal at the time. “We’re talking months, not years.”

While industry voices argue opposition to the pesticide is based on fear rather than science, it may not matter if enough Republicans feel pressure from Kennedy’s base.

“It’s a toxic treadmill with chemical cocktails that the farmers have been enrolled in and it’s very difficult for them to get off it,” Zen Honeycutt, executive director of the group Moms Across America, told NOTUS at the Monday rally.