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22 This elaborate theory is no more convincing than Jones’ arguments. Its most striking flaw is the seemingly arbitrary linkage it posits between the saving clause and state prisoners’ statutory postconviction remedies. While it is true that §2255, as enacted, afforded the same rights federal prisoners previously enjoyed under the general habeas statutes, see Hayman, 342 U. S., at 219, nothing in §2255’s text, structure, or history suggests that Congress intended any part of it to implicitly cross-reference whatever modifications to state prisoners’ postconviction remedies might be made in the future. Understanding the saving clause to do so would have highly counterintuitive implications: On the Government’s view, §§§ [sic]2255(h)(1) and (h)(2) dodoes [sic] not create an adequacy or effectiveness problem only because of the parallel state-prisoner provisions in §2244(b). It seems to follow that if Congress relaxed §2244(b)’s second-or-successive restrictions for state prisoners tomorrow, and did nothing else, §2255 would suddenly become “inadequate or ineffective to test” at least some second or successive fact-based claims that did not satisfy §2255(h)(1) or constitutional claims that did not satisfy §2255(h)(2), and that those claims would then be allowed to proceed under §2241. We see no indication that the spare language of the saving clause creates such a Rube Goldberg contrivance, whereby changes to other statutory provisions (which do not apply to federal prisoners at all) could flow back into §2255 and undermine §2255(h).

In any event, as the Government acknowledges, a state prisoner could never bring a pure statutory-error claim in federal habeas, because “ ‘federal habeas corpus relief does