Opinion of the Court
to put to rest.” Wright v. Spaulding, 939 F. 3d 695, 707 (CA6 2019) (Thapar, J., concurring). Section 2255 owes its existence to Congress’ pragmatic judgment that the sentencing court, not the District Court for the district of confinement, is the best venue for a federal prisoner’s collateral attack on his sentence. Channeling a particular class of second or successive attacks back into §2241 would mean once again “[c]oncentrat[ing] ‘an inordinate number of habeas corpus actions’ in districts with large prison populations” and requiring District Courts “to review each other’s proceedings—often without access to the witnesses, the sources of evidence, or other local information that may be critical.” Id., at 707–708 (quoting Hayman, 342 U. S., at 214). “The illogical results of applying such an interpretation … argue strongly against the conclusion that Congress intended these results.” Western Air Lines, Inc. v. Board of Equalization of S. D., 480 U. S. 123, 133 (1987).
Here, as often is the case, the best interpretation is the straightforward one. Section 2255(h) specifies the two limited conditions in which Congress has permitted federal prisoners to bring second or successive collateral attacks on their sentences. The inability of a prisoner with a statutory claim to satisfy those conditions does not mean that he can bring his claim in a habeas petition under the saving clause. It means that he cannot bring it at all. Congress has chosen finality over error correction in his case.
III
Resisting this reading, Jones and the United States both argue that §2255(h)’s exclusion of statutory claims sometimes renders §2255 inadequate or ineffective, though they advance different theories of when and why it does so. Their arguments are unpersuasive.
A
Jones begins with a textual interpretation of the saving
