Intimidate” is a tough, fighting word, and people took notice when Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist used it in a pointed rebuke to Congress in his annual year-end report. He referred to a little-noticed law enacted last spring that placed federal judges under special scrutiny for imposing sentences that fall short of sentencing guidelines. He said that such strictures “could appear to be an unwarranted and ill-considered effort to intimidate individual judges in the performance of their judicial duties.”

The measure in question is known as the Feeney amendment, for its sponsor, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla. He tacked it onto the popular Child Abduction Protection Act, which passed overwhelmingly. At the time, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote that the amendment “would do serious harm to the basic structure of the sentencing guideline system and would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and responsible sentences.”

In his year-end report, the chief justice acknowledged that Congress needs to collect information about the sentencing guidelines, including the so-called “downward departures.” But he found it troubling to have the information collected on a judge-by-judge basis, which was the requirement of the Feeney amendment. It ordered the U.S. Sentencing Commission to keep records of each individual judge’s sentencing departures and send them to the attorney general, who then forwards the files to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees.

Many judges resent any intrusion on their independence and object to the new rule. The Judicial Conference of the United States, a 27-judge body that makes policy for the federal courts, voted unanimously in September to ask Congress to repeal the amendment.

The matter is not much of an issue in Maine. U.S. District Judge George Z. Singal, chief judge of the federal district courts in Maine, said: “Maine has a rather low rate of downward departures aside from those requested by the government.” Prosecutors sometimes ask for reduced sentences in drug cases when a convicted person can assist in further prosecutions.

Lawmakers are divided on the issue. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, James Sensenbrenner Jr. , R-Wis., promptly defended the measure because downward departures had been “undermining sentencing fairness throughout the federal system.” But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the amendment was undermining judicial independence by creating “blacklists based on the sentencing practices of individual federal judges.”

When Congress created the system of sentencing guidelines in 1984, it wisely permitted judges to depart from the guidelines when necessary, on the ground that no system can anticipate all the facts and circumstances of as given case. The Feeney amendment tended to eliminate that safety valve and transform the federal guidelines into a system of mandatory minimum sentences.

Chief Justice Rehnquist argued that the Justice Department could learn informally about any judge’s downward departure and could appeal a case if it felt the sentence reduction was unwarranted. He said that Congress should have obtained the views of the judiciary before passing the Feeney amendment. Rep. Sensenbrenner denied there was any breakdown in communication between Congress and the judiciary and said Congress was aware of the judiciary’s objections.

But the chief justice had anticipated that contention. In a detailed account of historic cooperation between Congress and the judiciary, he quoted Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in a 1939 address to a joint session of Congress: “In the great enterprise of making democracy workable, we are all partners. One member of our body cannot say to another, ‘I have no need of thee.’ We work in successful cooperation by being true, each department to its own function, and all to the spirit which pervades our institutions.”

Well said. The ball is now in Congress’ court. It should repeal the needless and offensive amendment.