148
Opinion of the Court
lative history to cloud a statutory text that is clear.18 Moreover, were we to find § 5322(a)'s "willfulness" requirement ambiguous as applied to § 5324, we would resolve any doubt in favor of the defendant. Hughey v. United States, 495 U. S. 411, 422 (1990) (lenity principles "demand resolution of ambiguities in criminal statutes in favor of the defendant"); Crandon v. United States, 494 U. S. 152, 160 (1990) ("Because construction of a criminal statute must be guided by the need for fair warning, it is rare that legislative history or statutory policies will support a construction of a statute broader than that clearly warranted by the text."); United States v. Bass, 404 U. S. 336, 347-350 (1971) (rule of lenity premised on concepts that " 'fair warning should be given to the world in language that the common world will understand, of what the law intends to do if a certain line is passed' " and that "legislatures and not courts should define
would also "create the offense of structuring a transaction to evade the reporting requirements." S. Rep. No. 99-433, at 22. The relevance of Tobon-Builes to the proper construction of § 5324(3), the subsection under which Ratzlaf was convicted, is not evident.
18 See Barnhill v. Johnson, 503 U. S. 393, 401 (1992) (appeals to legislative history are well taken only to resolve statutory ambiguity). See also United States v. Aversa, 984 F. 2d, at 499, n. 8 (commenting that legislative history of provisions here at issue " 'is more conflicting than the [statutory] text is ambiguous' ") (quoting Wong Yang Sung v. McGrath, 339 U. S. 33, 49 (1950)). As the First Circuit noted, no House, Senate, or Conference Report accompanied the final version of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986; instead, over 20 separate reports accompanied various proposed bills, portions of which were incorporated into that Act. See 1986 U. S. C. C. A. N. 5393 (listing reports).
The dissent, see post, at 161, features a House Report issued in 1991 in
connection with an unenacted version of the Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act. We do not find that Report, commenting on a bill that did not pass, a secure indicator of congressional intent at any time, and it surely affords no reliable guide to Congress' intent in 1986. See Oscar Mayer & Co. v. Evans, 441 U. S. 750, 758 (1979) (cautioning against giving weight to "history" written years after the passage of a statute).
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