Republican members of the state’s House of Delegates launched the Maryland Freedom Caucus Tuesday, modeled after the similarly named conservative group in Congress and state legislatures across the country.

The seven members represent a fraction of House Republicans in a chamber where the Democrats hold a better than 2-to-1 majority. They aren’t an official caucus yet.

But the group brought their state party’s top dog to Lawyers Mall in Annapolis, U.S. Rep Andy Harris, who chairs the U.S. House Freedom Caucus and serves as Maryland’s only Republican federal delegation member.

These Republicans, often brushed aside in Democrat-led Annapolis for their far-right alignment, rode the changing tides of national politics, showing that they may have more friends in high places than their blue counterparts.

Maryland Democrats have never needed Harris’s sway in Washington more than they’ll need it over the next four years of Donald Trump’s second administration. Maryland’s economy has many federal ties, and it’s still uncertain how Trump or other Republicans will shake up the status quo.

Harris pointed to the group as politicians who will push back against Maryland’s Democratic agenda and took a swipe at Gov. Wes Moore for suggesting he would raise taxes.

”That’s what Democrats do,” Harris said. “They raise taxes.”

Moore revealed he’ll propose raising taxes on well-off individuals and give tax cuts to roughly two-thirds of Marylanders in an opinion piece published Tuesday.

Harris said Moore and the Democrats need to “stop blaming others,” including Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration, for their budget woes.

”Amazingly enough,” Harris said, after reading a quote of Moore’s, “the fault he [Moore] found with how Maryland got into its fiscal crisis is always anybody but the Maryland General Assembly, which has been spending its way into oblivion for the past several decades.”

Overall, the state must patch a $3 billion budget deficit and Republican leaders have strongly opposed any new taxes. Democrats have said the structural deficit occurred because the state underestimated the cost of health care programs for developmentally disabled adults and inmates.

”In this country,” Harris said, “those who elected President Trump president believe the time of taking money from citizens to expand the scope and size of government has to come to an end.”

At an event in College Park, reporters asked Moore about the Freedom Caucus blaming Democrats for the budget deficit.

”My response is: I don’t point fingers. I point direction,” Moore said. “The direction we’re going is growth.”

He added: “If people want to spend their time saying which party is responsible for this, which party is responsible for that, I think those are the political games that frankly exhaust all of us as Marylanders.”

The Maryland Freedom Caucus, chaired by Del. Matt Morgan, will join a dozen other similar Republican groups collaborating through the State Freedom Caucus Network.

Morgan said they’re partnering with the national organization because they believe Maryland is “worth saving.”

“We believe there’s been a void of conservative leadership in this state for quite some time,” he said. “And we’re going to fill that void now.”

Morgan, from St. Mary’s County, said Harris had given the group advice and guidance on how to form their caucus.

”We wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Andy Harris,” Morgan said.

Member Del. Ryan Nawrocki of Baltimore County acknowledged that with only a few members, they are starting out small. But so did the U.S. House Freedom Caucus, he said.

”You start out with a core group of people that are committed to an ideal, and you demonstrate success,” he said. “And that’s how you go anywhere.”

The group is discussing whether to seek formal recognition from House and Senate leadership and plans to release their agenda in the next week.

Baltimore Banner reporter Pamela Wood contributed to this article.