Sacramento -- Two weeks after branding them "special interests" and bragging he can "kick their butt," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was sued Tuesday by California's largest nursing union as it moved to uphold landmark hospital staffing ratios recently blocked by his administration.
The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento Superior Court by the California Nurses Association, attacks the governor's suspension of a 1-to-5 nurse-to-patient staffing requirement that was to become law next week, in part by charging his action illegally subverts the Legislature.
The bill, a first-in-the-nation mandate to ensure patient care would not suffer from overburdened nurses, was passed in the Legislature and signed into law in 1999 by then-Gov. Gray Davis.
In its lawsuit filed Tuesday, the 60,000-member nurses' association reiterates its claim that failure to further lower the number of patients assigned to each nurse on a general medical floor endangers care. But the group also charged that Schwarzenegger's move fell short of the legal requirement for issuing an emergency regulation -- and that the governor had abused his discretion in doing so. "There was no emergency," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the nurses' association. She called Schwarzenegger's act "a special interest payoff" that typifies a period of leadership "when corporations really do control a government."
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