President Donald Trump told America to view the midterm elections as a referendum on him. On Tuesday, America did just that and pulled the U.S. House decisively out of Republican hands. At last, there will be one chamber of Congress positioned to restrain rather than enable this president's worst tendencies.

Even Republicans who won should heed the broader message the voters sent. They include Senator-elect Josh Hawley, who unseated two-term Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., with a campaign that rested largely on the twin pillars of kowtowing to Trumpism and misleading voters about health care.

We (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) opposed Hawley's candidacy because he has failed to call out Trump's egregious behavior, whether it was the president's shameful apathy toward the murderous racism on display in Charlottesville, or his shameless siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence during their Helsinki summit or his repugnant midterm strategy to portray a Central American migrant caravan as an "invasion." Hawley himself garnered well-deserved national scorn for claiming to be a protector of people with pre-existing medical conditions while suing to dismantle their coverage.

Still, Hawley decisively won, and he has earned the chance to be a successful senator. That will require him to discover the courage that eluded him as a candidate and stand up to this president when he knows he's wrong.

The new House Democratic majority, meanwhile, shouldn't view its victory as a license to engage in scorched-earth partisanship. Voters are as tired of that as they are of Trump's antics. Democrats' mandate is to behave like grown-ups in a room that hasn't had any for too long.

This means imposing real oversight on Trump when he threatens to erode constitutional rights, damage America's standing with allies or further interfere with the investigation of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller — as he appeared to do Wednesday by forcing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign. It means preventing further sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, imposing fiscal discipline and blocking any new coddle-the-rich tax schemes. And it means promoting policy initiatives — a major infrastructure program comes to mind — on which Democrats might find bipartisan support.

It also means resisting the urge to engage in partisan stunts, such as an endless series of symbolic impeachment votes that will be dead on arrival in the Republican Senate. Democrats should use their new House majority to demonstrate that at least one of our two major parties isn't driven entirely by animus and power lust.

As for continued Republican control of the Senate: No, this wasn't a "split decision" by voters. It was widely understood that accidents of the map virtually guaranteed a GOP Senate win this year. The GOP got a reprieve, not a mandate. These next two years are the Republican Party's last chance to show America that it can rein in Trump's worst impulses and, perhaps, even work across the aisle.

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