D.C. Mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray and council Chairman-elect Kwame Brown have reached the put-up-or-shut-up point. After weeks of talking about the need to make tough budget decisions, Tuesday they must act. That is when the legislature takes its first vote on Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s $188 million gap-closing proposal for fiscal 2011. Last week, during a council public hearing, a steady stream of special interest groups and advocates, who haven’t seen a program cut they could endorse or a tax increase they could reject, argued against Fenty’s plan. The outgoing executive submitted a revised 2011 budget with expenditure reductions that, if approved, would touch nearly every government agency, including entitlements. Some council members have blasted the proposal for forcing the city’s most “vulnerable” to bear the brunt of the budget crisis.

That spare-the-poor-and-working-class-at-any-cost approach, irresponsible budget policies, and an inherited imbalance in the fiscal structure converged in the 1990s to bring the District to the brink of bankruptcy. Elected officials back then lacked the courage to right size the government.