House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (C) is joined by (L-R) Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) for a news conference in the House Vistiors Center in the U.S. Capitol March 24, 2017 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

There’s principled opposition, and then there’s political gamesmanship, and today’s Democratic Party has a remarkable knack for choosing the wrong one at the wrong time.

In the moments after it became clear that House Republicans had passed the Trump-endorsed American Health Care Act, a handful of legislators began to sing. The voices rose up from the House floor: “Na na na na / hey he-hey / goodbye.”

I assumed at first—as did at least one CNN on-air analyst—that it was Republicans celebrating the demise of Obamacare. But no: According to multiple reporters present, the song came from a group of Democratic legislators. The implication: By voting to pass the unpopular bill, GOP lawmakers had ensured that they’d be voted out of office at the next opportunity.

Democrats didn’t just come up with this out of the blue. As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall points out, it was a mocking callback to Republicans’ behavior after the Clinton tax hike of 1993: This is both an homage and a literal repetition of what Republicans did when the Clinton tax bill passed in the House in 1993. Same singing, same song. The bill paved the way for budget balancing over the course of the decade and (more arguably) played a role in creating the prosperity of that decade. It also came little more than a year before Democratic majorities in both Houses were annihilated in the 1994 midterm.

Be that as it may: It’s disgusting. This was not an own goal at a soccer game. It was not a vote noteworthy solely for its long-term effects on the partisan balance of Congress. It was a vote for a bill that, if signed into law, would likely strip health coverage from millions of Americans while potentially threatening protections for many more. It was not an occasion for singing. And it sure as hell wasn’t an occasion for celebration by the party that failed to stop it—the party whose members purport to represent the interests of the vulnerable citizens whom Trumpcare would affect.