Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-857_4357.pdf
Page Number: 16

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

make it impossible or impracticable to seek relief in the sen-
tencing court, as well as for challenges to detention other 
than collateral attacks on a sentence.  Because AEDPA did 
not alter the text of §2255(e), there is little reason to think 
that  it  altered  the  pre-existing  division  of  labor  between
§§2241  and  2255.  AEDPA’s  new  restrictions  on  §2255, 
therefore, are best understood as just that—restrictions on
§2255—not as expansions of §2241’s applicability.

Any  other  reading  would  make  AEDPA  curiously  self-
defeating.  It would mean that, by expressly excluding sec-
ond or successive §2255 motions based on nonconstitutional 
legal  developments,  Congress  accomplished  nothing  in 
terms  of  actually  limiting  such  claims.    Instead,  it  would 
have merely rerouted them from one remedial vehicle and 
venue to another.  Stranger still, Congress would have pro-
vided  “a  superior  remedy”  for  the  very  nonconstitutional
claims it chose not to include in §2255(h).  McCarthan, 851 
F. 3d,  at  1091.  After  escaping  §2255  through  the  saving
clause, nonconstitutional claims would no longer be subject 
to  AEDPA’s  other  express  procedural  restrictions:  the  1-
year limitations period, see §2255(f ), and the requirement
that  a  prisoner  obtain a  certificate  of  appealability  before
appealing  an  adverse  decision  in  the  District  Court,  see 
§2253(c)(1).3  We generally “resist attributing to Congress 
an intention to render a statute so internally inconsistent.” 
Greenlaw v. United States, 554 U. S. 237, 251 (2008). 

That resistance is particularly acute here, where allow-
ing nonconstitutional claims to proceed under §2241 would 
mean “resurrecting the very problems §2255 was supposed 

—————— 

3 It is no answer to say that the saving clause must apply sometimes
and that these procedural restrictions are inapplicable whenever it does.
Cf. Reply Brief for Petitioner 12; Reply Brief for Respondent 9–10.  Al-
lowing  second  or  successive  nonconstitutional  claims  to  circumvent 
§2255(h)  under  the  saving  clause  would  confer  favored  treatment  for 
nonconstitutional  claims  as  a  class,  a  result  directly  at  odds  with  the 
manifest tenor of §2255(h).