(CNN) — Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks told Johnson County Republicans in an August meeting that she’ll hold town hall meetings “when hell freezes over.”

The Republican, who represents one of the nation’s most competitive House districts in southeastern Iowa, has faced questions for months over when she’ll hold a public town hall after promising to do so in April.

And in the meeting with the Johnson County Republicans of Iowa — which was later posted on YouTube by the county party, where it went largely unnoticed at the time — she was blunt, saying she’s already being hounded over Medicaid cuts in the GOP’s massive government funding and policy bill.

“You know, I don’t have to hold a town hall so you can come and yell at me,” said Miller-Meeks, who won by 799 votes in 2024 and faces a likely rematch next year with Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan.

“You can yell at me at the county fair — and you did! And you did. They did,” she said. “You know, you yell at me in church, you yell at me at the county fair, I’m out in public all the damn time. Someone yelled at me at the speedway.”

Miller-Meeks added: “You have plenty of opportunities to yell at me and tell me I should be ashamed of myself, and by the way, I am not.”

Miller-Meeks’ comments came amid scrutiny over her and many other House Republicans refusing to hold public, in-person town halls. Party leaders, including the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, have advised against town halls after strong opposition to the GOP’s spending cuts burst into view at some town halls this spring.

Miller-Meeks pointed to independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg criticizing her and other swing district Republicans over their votes for President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“We took the hard votes on reconciliation. We’ve been beat to crap over what we did on Medicaid. You know because you all have seen it,” she said.

Miller-Meeks told the Johnson County Republicans that she was being pressed on when she’d hold a town hall by Tom Barton, a politics reporter for The Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids. “When hell freezes over,” she said.

Miller-Meeks did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on her August remarks to Johnson County Republicans. But she did defend herself last week, telling the Gazette’s Barton, “Every time I walk around Iowa — every meeting that I go to, every rotary I attend, every county fair I go to — I am out in the public. I am out in the open, and I can answer anyone’s questions they have,” Miller-Meeks said.

She told Barton that Democrats pressing GOP incumbents to hold town halls just want “other people like-minded to scream and yell at people so they can videotape screaming and yelling at people.”

“And even when we were doing our press conference at the State Fair, people screamed and yelled and videotaped their screaming and yelling,” she told the newspaper. “And then other people had, you know, reasonable questions that they wanted answers to, and we were able to do that. So more than happy to meet with individuals, as I do always when I’m in district.”

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