336
Opinion of the Court
1544, 1546 (CA11 1989); United States v. Martinez, 837 F. 2d 861, 865-866 (CA9 1988). Congress' conversion of an active sentence in § 3568 into a passive sentence in § 3585(b) strikes us as a rather slim ground for presuming an intention to change these well-established procedures. "It is not lightly to be assumed that Congress intended to depart from a long established policy." Robertson v. Railroad Labor Bd., 268 U. S. 619, 627 (1925).
C
Wilson argues that our conclusion conflicts with the familiar maxim that, when Congress alters the words of a statute, it must intend to change the statute's meaning. See Russello v. United States, 464 U. S. 16, 23-24 (1983). He asserts that, by removing the explicit reference to the Attorney General when it enacted § 3585(b), Congress expressed a desire to remove the Attorney General from the process of computing sentences. Otherwise, Wilson contends, Congress would have had no reason to modify the provision as it did. We have no difficulty with the general presumption that Congress contemplates a change whenever it amends a statute. In this case, however, we find that presumption overcome by our conclusions that the District Court cannot perform the necessary calculation at the time of sentencing and that the Attorney General, in implementing the defendant's sentence, cannot avoid computing the credit.
We candidly acknowledge that we do not know what happened to the reference to the Attorney General during the revision. We do know that Congress entirely rewrote § 3568 when it changed it to its present form in § 3585(b). It rearranged its clauses, rephrased its central idea in the passive voice, and more than doubled its length. In view of these changes, and because any other interpretation would require us to stretch the meaning of the words that § 3585(b) now includes, we think it likely that the former reference to the Attorney General was simply lost in the shuffle.
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