A Republican delegate in Virginia is apparently game to gift large, politically inconvenient swaths of his state to the District of Columbia.

Some jurisdictions in Virginia “are becoming more like California and New York,” Delegate Dave LaRock told a reporter for the Winchester Star last week. The delegate—who represents a district that encompasses parts of Frederick, Loudoun, and Clarke counties—went on to say that “he could get behind a move to have more liberal jurisdictions such as Arlington and Alexandria become part of Washington, D.C.,” per the Winchester Star.

“While we’re all Virginians, the values—the liberal values—that guide policy seem to be very different in these concentrated areas where Democrats dominate, and that’s most of Northern Virginia,” LaRock tells DCist.

A Facebook page associated with LaRock’s campaign for delegate vociferously supported the suggestion, which he offered up as an alternative to the idea that Frederick County should perhaps be subsumed into West Virginia, a state that aligns closer politically with constituents there. Last week, the West Virginia Senate adopted a resolution that recalled the state’s 158-year-old invitation to Frederick County to become a part of the state.

“As concentrations of Democrats near WDC NoVa, want to dictate how ROVA (rest-of-Virginia) lives, Frederick County Va. considers joining WV. Please, instead, just SQUARE THE BOX,” reads a post on the Facebook page, along with an image of a map filling in the missing part of D.C.’s diamond. “Give Arlington and Alexandria to the District of Columbia.”

Over the last decade or so, suburban areas in Northern Virginia have become more densely populated than ever before, with a larger immigrant population than many other parts of the state. These areas helped give the Democrats control of the Virginia statehouse for the first time in more than 20 years.

It’s not exactly an unprecedented suggestion—these parts of Virginia were originally part of the District, anyway. The city retroceded the area back to Virginia in 1846, largely because of political momentum to ban slavery in D.C. (Alexandria was a major slave trading hub).

It’s also not the only current suggestion to rearrange the District’s borders. Some advocates against D.C. as the 51st state instead want the city to be subsumed into Maryland and renamed “Douglass County” as a way for Washingtonians to gain more complete voting rights.

But LaRock’s idea would have some serious consequences for the commonwealth. As Blue Virginia points out, Northern Virginia is a crucial element of the state’s economy. A decade ago, former Gov. Bob McDonnell described it as “the economic engine of the state.” Presumably, gifting these areas to the District would have a negative impact on Virginia’s coffers.

“Yes, Northern Virginia generates a lot of revenue, but they’re also going to control where it’s spent,” LaRock says. “It’s one thing to have a partner who’s wealthy, but if that wealth, or in this case tax revenue, isn’t being distributed throughout the state, then that’s a reason to terminate the partnership.”

LaRock continues that although he hasn’t done a “real analysis” of the economic implications of giving up NoVa, he feels “fairly confident that the deciding factor in the eyes of many people I serve would not be on the economic side of this, it would be on the values side.”

He says that he knows the likelihood of changing the state’s boundaries is very slim, but he’s concerned about “an overreach by Democrats as they enjoy this newfound power” in state government.

LaRock is a very conservative delegate who has spoken out against laws that would mandate teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns in schools, and has said that Virginia should not provide protections to people for “chosen sexual habits.”

This story has been updated with comment from Delegate Dave LaRock.