In an open letter Thursday to President Barack Obama, Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint addressed what he described as a “temporary slowdown in government operations” as he continued his call to halt the health care law.

“[A]t minimum,” wrote Demint, “both sides should agree not to fund the law for one year—a ‘time-out’ that would halt the law’s most harmful effects before they start.”

The former GOP senator from South Carolina has spent the last several months trying to build support for the effort to defund the Affordable Care Act. Although many described the effort as fruitless — citing the dim likelihood of Obama agreeing to gut his signature legislative achievement — DeMint said in August that “we don’t know” if the president would veto such a bill.

DeMint wasn’t the first conservative to apply a different label to the first government shutdown since 1996. On its website earlier this month, Fox News referred to the shutdown as a “slimdown.”

Read DeMint’s entire letter here.