Cite as: 519 U. S. 482 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
Historical and Revision Notes following § 1014, 18 U. S. C., p. 247. Respondents say that the revisers' failure to mention the omission of materiality from the text of § 1014 means that Congress must have "completely overlooked" the issue. Brief for Respondents 29-30. But surely this indication that the "staff of experts" who prepared the legislation, Muniz v. Hoffman, 422 U. S. 454, 470, n. 10 (1975), either overlooked or chose to say nothing about changing the language of three of the former statutes does nothing to muddy the ostensibly unambiguous provision of the statute as enacted by Congress, cf. Consumer Product Safety Comm'n v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 447 U. S. 102, 108 (1980) ("Absent a clearly expressed legislative intention to the contrary, [statutory] language must ordinarily be regarded as conclusive"). In any event, the revisers' assumption that the consolidation made no substantive change was simply wrong. As respondents candidly conceded at oral argument, they failed to discover a single case holding that any of the predecessor statutes lacking a materiality requirement implicitly contained one, and after our decision in Kay v. United States, 303 U. S. 1 (1938), Congress could not have assumed that a materiality element was implicit in a comparable statute that was silent on the issue, see supra, at 494-495. Dropping the materiality element from the three statutes could not, then, reasonably have been seen as making no change. Those who write revisers' notes have proven fallible before. See State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. v. Tashire, 386 U. S. 523, 532, n. 11 (1967).20
phrased "composite" of the then-existing terms. See Historical and Revision Notes following § 1014, 18 U. S. C., p. 247.
20 The dissent contends that, because McClanahan v. United States, 12 F. 2d 263, 264 (CA7 1926), and United States v. Kreidler, 11 F. Supp. 402, 403 (SD Iowa 1935), "held or assumed that" two statutes without an explicit materiality requirement nonetheless carried an implicit one, the revisers likely assumed that all of the statutes consolidated in § 1014 contained a materiality requirement. Post, at 502-503. Neither case, however, held that one of § 1014's predecessor statutes contained a materiality
497
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