statutes or the Habeas Rules. Scalia stated that the Court did not identify any such inconsistency "because there is none." Scalia believed the forfeiture rule could not be inconsistent with traditional habeas practice because there was no applicable statute of limitations until AEDPA was enacted in 1996. It was also consistent with Habeas Rule 5(b), which requires the State's answer to state whether any claim in the habeas petition is barred by the statute of limitations. Finally, as Day had argued, forfeiture is also consistent with Habeas Rule 4 because that rule provides for sua sponte screening and dismissal by the district courts only prior to the filing of the State's answer. Scalia believed that the Court's concern over whether district courts could ever raise the AEDPA limitation sua sponte under Day's construction of the Habeas Rules begged the question, by assuming that courts should be able to raise that issue sua sponte. "That is precisely the question before us." Scalia considered it most important that no provision of the habeas statute would be contradicted or undermined by applying the forfeiture rule to the limitations period. "Quite the contrary, on its most natural reading, the statute calls for the forfeiture rule." AEDPA enacted the one-year limitation period "without further qualification." Given the "background understanding" that failure to raise the defense of limitations constitutes waiver, "the statute implies that the usual forfeiture rule is applicable." Scalia distinguished the other affirmative defenses to habeas petitions as having been created as judicial doctrines by the courts, "in the exercise of their traditional equitable discretion, because they were seen as necessary to protect the interests of comity and finality that federal collateral review of state criminal proceedings necessarily implicates." None of the defenses involved a time limitation, and the one-year limit in AEDPA "is entirely a recent creature of statute. If comity and finality did not compel any time limitation at all, it follows a fortiori that they do not compel making a legislatively created, forfeitable time limitation nonforfeitable." Court precedent prior to AEDPA had furthermore affirmatively rejected that the traditionally broad discretionary powers of habeas courts would support the imposition of a time limitation. "There is, therefore, no support for the notion that the traditional equitable discretion that governed habeas proceedings permitted the dismissal of habeas petitions on the sole ground of untimeliness." The Court's observation that there was no substantive difference between