Just when you're fed up with the U.S. Congress (the approval rating is 11 percent) comes word that it has passed and sent to the president an overhaul of the 1976 Toxic Chemicals and Substances Act, generally regarded as the weakest environmental law on the books.

And it only took 10 years. The Environmental Protection Agency is now free to begin testing 64,000 household chemicals to determine how dangerous some of them are. But lest the EPA get carried away with its new powers, the new law restricts the agency to testing only 20 chemicals at a time, with a maximum testing period of seven years.

If each test took only one year, EPA would need 3,200 years to get through the backlog. For purposes of comparison, the Trojan War took place 3,200 years ago.

And yet this entirely inadequate bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, 403 to 12 in the House, and by a simple voice vote in the Senate. President Barack Obama is expected to sign it.

This is what bipartisanship looks like: Republicans swallowed hard and allowed some new regulations for industry. Democrats swallowed hard and voted for environmental legislation that's only marginally better than the sorry law it replaces.

How bad was the 1976 law? It allowed the use of cancer-causing asbestos, long after it was determined that asbestos contributes to 15,000 deaths a year. Civil lawsuits, not the EPA, halted the widespread use of asbestos.

The good parts of the new law will allow the EPA to determine whether a new chemical is likely to meet safety standards before it enters the market. The agency can ban those new chemicals found to build up in the human body and those that imperil water supplies.

A bad part — other than the very long timeline for existing chemicals — is that the chemical industry doesn't have to pay for testing. A GOP-controlled Congress is unlikely to boost the EPA's budget, and lacking proper funding, the agency will be handcuffed.

Another bad part: Certain states, most notably California, have stricter laws than the feds. The new bill pre-empts state laws, posing a problem for conservative "Tenthers" who argue that the 10th Amendment requires the federal government to defer to state governments on any powers not outlined in the Constitution, such as regulating health care.

Check your kitchen or bathroom. Read the ingredients in, say, toilet bowl cleaners or dishwasher soap. Some ingredients, such as ammonia, you know aren't good for you. Others — 5-dimethyldantoin and phenon, for example — you take on faith.

That's a mistake. How bad? We'll get back to the EPA on that sometime during the next three millennia. We'd argue that the president should veto this bill except it's better than nothing. That's a lousy standard for consumer protection.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH