“Skynyrd Fan Discovers Lost 10th Amendment”

Washington, D.C. - One day after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Justin Appleby, a Toledo man who sued the State of Ohio over a defective scratch-off lottery ticket, a prominent Constitutional historian and Lynyrd Skynyrd fan has discovered a previously unknown 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Clement Del Negro, a Washington-based attorney and highly respected Constitutional historian, discovered the missing document while researching the lyrics to “That Smell” at the Library of Congress in Washington. “I was fingering through a hardbound copy of ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd – I’ll never forget you’ by Gene Odom, and there it was,” said a still mesmerized Del Negro. “I was shocked.”

The 10th Amendment reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.”

The meaning of the amendment has been the subject of intense debate since its discovery. “It seems to suggest that states are to have some kind of decision-making ability in governing people,” said Aaron Starr, California State Chair of the Libertarian Party. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissented. “The States will do as I tell them to do!” Asked whether he thought the discovery would cause the Court to reconsider its earlier rulings on issues like school prayer, abortion, affirmative action, state lottery tickets, handicap golfers, or the 2000 Presidential Election, Rehnquist could only bellow a dark, sinister laugh.

Since the story first broke, Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss) has come forward and admitted to placing the document in the Skynyrd biography, after having originally discovered it in a late-18th Century journal by Thomas Jefferson. “I was going to take [the amendment] up to the Hill, but then I got engrossed reading about Ronnie VanZant’s Harley, and I accidentally left it in there as a bookmark.”

The known U.S. Constitution currently has twenty-six amendments, the first nine commonly referred to as “The Bill of Rights.” Experts could only speculate on where the new amendment would be situated in the Constitution, or whether it would be repealed by a new amendment or an Act of the High Court.

In yesterday’s landmark 8-1 ruling, “Appleby vs. The State of Ohio,” The Supreme Court awarded Plaintiff Justin Appleby $25 and a free lottery ticket as a result of what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, called “a gross disfiguration of a scratch-off lottery ticket which fundamentally impaired Mr. Appleby’s chances of winning.” In a dissenting opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “There is sufficient reason to believe that the device Mr. Appleby used to excoriate the surface of the ticket, namely a salad fork, is to have caused the very disfiguration that impaired him so.”