Impeachment proceedings may have dominated the headlines so far this week, but the nation’s capital isn’t the only place where rarely used portions of the Constitution are getting new attention. Over 80 miles away, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, Governor Jim Justice and Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. made an unusual pitch to the residents of border counties in Virginia: Leave the Old Dominion and join up with the Mountaineers.*

“If you’re not truly happy where you are, we stand with open arms to take you from Virginia or anywhere where you may be,” Justice said in a press conference on Tuesday. “We stand strongly behind the Second Amendment, and we stand strongly for the unborn.” Border disputes are nothing new, of course. North Carolina and South Carolina negotiated an end to a long-running debate over thousands of acres as recently as 2014. But while there’s occasional talk about handing over most of D.C. to Maryland or carving up California, the states haven’t redistributed large, populated swaths of territory among themselves in living memory.

I’ll give the two men credit for thinking big. The problem is that they aren’t thinking big enough. Falwell reportedly envisions that Virginia’s border counties could fill out petitions to join West Virginia and then submit them to the Richmond legislature for approval. (That might not cover Liberty, which is in Lynchburg, deep in Virginia’s interior.) It’s exceedingly doubtful that such a plan would work, of course. If it did come to pass, however, the legal challenges that would ensue might give the courts and the country a chance to repair the Civil War’s last remaining constitutional divide and finally reunify the Virginias.

In a statement posted on Twitter, Falwell gave the most comprehensive reason for the proposal. He largely blames Virginia Democrats and their policy choices. “Democrat leaders in Richmond, through their elitism and radicalism, have left a nearly unrecognizable state in their wake,” he explained. “Despite a spate of scandals over the past two years, the Democrats control every statewide elected office throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as both chambers of the State Legislature—and they are using their power to strip away the God-given rights held by every person in the state, despite their due protections under the U.S. Constitution.”

What he elides is that Virginia Democrats didn’t seize control of the state government by magic but because a majority of voters in the state wanted it that way. For Falwell, democracy is part of the problem. Virginia’s changing electorate has transformed it from a reddish-purple state into a solid blue one over the past two decades. Now he sees radical solutions as the only viable path forward. “The threat from the radical left is real, and it’s spreading across the country and tearing our national family apart at the seams, but we have a rare opportunity to make history in our time by pushing back against tyranny in Washington and in Richmond,” he warned.