Following Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling invalidating the Affordable Care Act, a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that almost half of Americans either believe that the health reform law has been repealed (22 percent) or don’t “know enough to say whether it is still law (26 percent).” Still, a majority want to keep major elements of the law, oppose defunding the measure, and would like to see Congress expand it or keep it as is:

The public’s unfamiliarity with the legal status of ACA is probably the most interesting finding, but it’s also the easiest to explain. The GOP’s hyperbolic campaign against the law (the conflicting votes for repeal in the House and the Senate) is at least partly responsible for the public confusion, but so is Vinson’s ruling itself — he issued a declaratory judgment without an injunction and the federal government continues to implement the law while some states are already sending money back. (It also doesn’t help that the media is much more likely to cover Vinson’s ruling than other district court decisions upholding the law.)

Americans have consistently said they they’re much more interested in jobs and the economy than revisiting the health law and given the general lack of knowledge about civics and all of the other competing priorities that populate daily life, the state of the law (which has not yet kicked in to a large degree) is a back-burner issue.

Shortly after Tea Party Judge Roger Vinson issued an error-ridden opinion striking down the Affordable Care Act, a non-party to the lawsuit named Robert Smith attempted to appeal Vinson’s decision. Vinson promptly replied by dismissing Smith’s notice of appeal on the grounds that, as a non-party, Smith cannot appeal. Yet there’s a big problem with Vinson’s decision to dismiss this appeal — as a trial judge, Vinson lacks the legal authority to decide an appellate matter.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit released an order today reminding Vinson who is in charge:

A district court has a ministerial duty to forward to the proper court of appeals any notice of appeal that is filed. District courts cannot dismiss an appeal based on a perceived defect.

In light of these well-established principles, Respondents, including the District Judge, are directed to file a response to the petition for writ of mandamus within 14 days of the date of this order.

It is, to say the least, unusual for a court of appeals to order a trial judge to explain why he failed to follow the law in handling a routine matter. While it is likely that Smith’s appeal will ultimately be dismissed by the Eleventh Circuit, Vinson’s inability to complete an easy and purely ministerial task raises questions about his competence.

Moreover, it is reasonably likely that the Eleventh Circuit issued this unusual order as a warning to Vinson against overreaching his own authority yet again. In Vinson’s erroneous decision striking down just one provision of the Affordable Care Act, Vinson not only reached the bizarre conclusion that the entire Act must be cast aside because one small piece is “defective,” he also implied that the federal government must immediately cease applying any part of the law. DOJ responded to Vinson’s legally-questionable opinion by pointing out that, among other things, Vinson did not take any of the legal steps that a judge is required to take before enjoining a party against future action — and seeking clarification about whether Vinson really meant that, despite his own failure to carry out these required legal steps, the United States is no longer allowed to enforce the ACA.

In light of this context, today’s Eleventh Circuit order pointing out a different, far less significant error on Vinson’s part could very well be a warning to the Tea Party judge that his judicial superiors are watching and they are prepared to put him in his place.

Politico’s Maggie Haberman scoured through Gov. Mike Huckabee’s new book A Simple Government to find that the likely presidential candidate is doubling down on his criticism of Mitt Romney’s signature health reform law in Massachusetts, arguing that reform has failed to control health care costs:

“If our goal in health-care reform is better care at lower cost, then we should take a lesson from RomneyCare, which shows that socialized medicine does not work,” he writes. [...]

“Not only is ObamaCare cost prohibitive, it’s already been shown to not work!” Huckabee writes on page 84 of his book.

“In chapter 2, I mentioned how the federal government ignored the negative results of the health-care ‘experiment’ known as RomneyCare. It could be argued that if RomneyCare were a patient, the prognosis would be dismal. ‘No one but Mr. Romney disagrees,’ quipped Joseph Rago, senior editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, in a piece entitled ‘The Massachusetts Health-Care Train Wreck.’” [...]

“A noble goal, indeed, but when the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation stepped into the lab to examine this experiment-in-progress, they found that health care, which was 16 percent of the state budget in 1990, had jumped to 35 percent in 2010. (That’s not a typo; health care is consuming over a third of the entire state budget!),” Huckabee writes. He adds, “You get one guess as to who now has the highest average health-insurance premiums in the country. Yep, it’s Massachusetts!”

Of course, Romney or anyone else associated with the very popular 2006 law would be the first to admit that unlike the Affordable Care Act, Massachusetts reform expanded access to care without controlling health care spending and as a result costs are now consuming a greater portion of the state budget.

As Romney himself explained in 2009, “when we were looking at solving the health care challenge here in Massachusetts, our focus was on getting people who were uninsured insured and stopping the practice of passing their cost on to the rest of the population. We really were unable to deal with and didn’t have any pretense that we would somehow be able to change health care costs in Massachusetts.” “Massachusetts is a model for getting everybody insured in a way that doesn’t break the bank and that doesn’t put the government into the driver’s seat and allows people to own their own insurance policies and not to have to worry about losing coverage,” he added.

Massachusetts reform proved that the individual and employer mandates can successfully increase access to coverage while showing that lawmakers must do more to control health spending. In fact, Gov. Deval Patrick has recently introduced a plan to contain costs.

During an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday night, Huckabee called RomneyCare the “800 pound gorilla in the room for him” and said that the Massachusetts governor should just fess up and admit his health care program’s not working.

“The position he should take is to say: ‘Look, the reason Obamacare won’t work is because we’ve tried it at the state level and we know it won’t work,’” Huckabee told AP. “It cost more, waiting times were higher, quality of care went down, people were greatly dissatisfied and it ended up having almost the polar opposite effect of what was intended.” Despite Huckabee’s assertions, countless surveys found that a majority of resident overwhelmingly approve of the state’s health care overhaul.