Opinion of the Court
make it impossible or impracticable to seek relief in the sentencing 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 second 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 provided “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).[1] 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 allowing nonconstitutional claims to proceed under §2241 would mean “resurrecting the very problems §2255 was supposed
- ↑ 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. Allowing 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).
