498
Opinion of the Court
Respondents next urge that we follow the reasoning of some Courts of Appeals in reading materiality into the statute to avoid the improbability that Congress intended to impose substantial criminal penalties on relatively trivial or innocent conduct. See 63 F. 3d, at 751; United States v. Williams, 12 F. 3d 452, 458 (CA5 1994); United States v. Staniforth, 971 F. 2d 1355, 1358 (CA7 1992). But we think there is no clear call to take such a course. It is true that we have held § 1014 inapplicable to depositing false checks at a bank, in part because we thought that it would have "ma[d]e a surprisingly broad range of unremarkable conduct a violation of federal law," Williams v. United States, 458 U. S., at 286-287, n. 8, and elsewhere thought it possible to construe a prohibition narrowly where a loose mens rea requirement would otherwise have resulted in a surprisingly broad statutory sweep, see United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U. S. 64, 71-72 (1994). But an unqualified
requirement. In Kreidler, the defendant challenged his indictment under § 8(a) of the Home Owners' Loan Act (the same provision at issue two years later in Kay, see n. 14, supra), arguing that a statement "must be material and calculated to deceive," Kreidler, 11 F. Supp., at 403. The District Court simply "assume[d]" the statement "must be relevant and material," and then found that the indictment satisfied those requirements. Id., at 403-404. The question in McClanahan was whether the defendant's prosecution under § 31 of the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916, 39 Stat. 382, 12 U. S. C. § 981 (1946 ed.), was beyond Congress's constitutional power because the statute did "not limit the [punishable] statement to such as relate or are material to the proposed loan." 12 F. 2d, at 263. The court upheld the constitutionality of the statute. While stating that it "would in all probability be concluded" that "wholly frivolous and unrelated" false statements made in a loan application "did not supply the basis for a prosecution under section 31," the court made it clear that this was dicta, because it explained in the very next sentence that "there [was] no question of the relevancy of the alleged false statements knowingly made" in the case before it. Id., at 264. In determining what the revisers might have thought the words of § 1014 meant, we think it far more likely that they would have relied on the clear implication of our 1938 decision in Kay v. United States, 303 U. S. 1, rather than on the dicta from two earlier District or Appeals Court cases.
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