174
Opinion of the Court
"State" and "Federal" are likely to be of no small import when Congress drafts a statute that governs federal collateral review of state court judgments.
Further, were we to adopt respondent's construction of the statute, we would render the word "State" insignifi-cant, if not wholly superfluous. "It is our duty 'to give effect, if possible, to every clause and word of a statute.' " United States v. Menasche, 348 U. S. 528, 538-539 (1955) (quoting Montclair v. Ramsdell, 107 U. S. 147, 152 (1883)); see also Williams v. Taylor, 529 U. S. 362, 404 (2000) (de-scribing this rule as a "cardinal principle of statutory construction"); Market Co. v. Hoffman, 101 U. S. 112, 115 (1879) ("As early as in Bacon's Abridgment, sect. 2, it was said that 'a statute ought, upon the whole, to be so construed that, if it can be prevented, no clause, sentence, or word shall be superfluous, void, or insignificant' "). We are thus "reluctan[t] to treat statutory terms as surplusage" in any setting. Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter, Communities for Great Ore., 515 U. S. 687, 698 (1995); see also Ratzlaf v. United States, 510 U. S. 135, 140 (1994). We are especially unwilling to do so when the term occupies so pivotal a place in the statutory scheme as does the word "State" in the federal habeas statute. But under respondent's rendition of § 2244(d)(2), Congress' inclusion of the word "State" has no operative effect on the scope of the provision. If the phrase "State post-conviction or other collateral review" is construed to encompass both state and federal collateral review, then the word "State" places no constraint on the class of applications for review that toll the limitation period. The clause instead would have precisely the same content were it to read "post-conviction or other collateral review."
The most that could then be made of the word "State" would be to say that Congress singled out applications for "State post-conviction" review as one example from the universe of applications for collateral review. Under this approach, however, the word "State" still does nothing to
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