Sen. Rob Portman thought he was just giving a speech on fixing the debt Tuesday. Instead, at least seven hecklers made sure that didn’t happen, interrupting the Republican repeatedly during a speech at a conference at a Washington hotel.

One after another, members of the group – which included four Ohioans – stood up to express worries about potential cuts to Medicare and their impact on working people.

Portman, R-Ohio, could barely complete a sentence. He offered to meet with the Ohioans afterward, but still, more hecklers stood up, as boos erupted both from those who wanted to hear Portman and those who wanted to hear the hecklers.

Finally, a woman from Washington stood up to tell Portman that her great-grandfather died fighting for Social Security. As her speech went on, she was escorted out, with the others following her and chanting, “We’re going to grow, not slow the economy.”

Portman sat down as the protesters left the room, then got up and started over again after they’d left.

“We can disagree on how we do it, but we’re not going to be able to get our fiscal house in order without additional revenue that comes from growth,” he told the crowd. “We also need to restrain spending. We need both because in Washington there is such a deep fiscal hole now, and we can’t climb out of it without both.” He said that “if we go through this fiscal cliff discussion and do not take advantage of that opportunity to put in place reforms in these entitlement programs, which are incredibly important but also unsustainable, and if we do not take advantage to look at our tax system, which is antiquated and outdated and inefficient, we will have squandered the opportunity to really address the longer term problem.”

“We’ll be right back on the cliff again,” he said.

After speaking, he met with the four protesters from Ohio for about a half hour, posing for pictures with them afterward.

Pat Youngblood, 67, of Cincinnati, was among them and was the second person to stand up during Portman’s remarks. She said she came to Washington earlier this week with Ohio’s Organizing Collaborative, a coalition of 14 organizations concerned about issues related to the poor. She said she decided to go to the event after having difficulty scheduling a meeting with Portman.

The retired laboratory manager is particularly concerned that her work caring for her sick brother does not count toward Social Security benefits. Caring for him, she said, has kept her from getting a part-time job.

But she’s particularly concerned about the impact of going off the fiscal cliff on working Americans. She said the working poor and the poor are already suffering from cuts to the safety net. “We can’t afford any more cuts,” she said. “We need to come up with some revenue for Ohio.”

She said she considered the meeting a success because Portman “listened to us, he actually took notes on what we said,” and gave feedback on what he thought. “It was an engaging conversation,” she said.