The 2020 Panetta series kicks off with media stars talking elections and impeachment.

Leon Panetta always lures big names for his panel discussions on civic matters, but this year he outdid himself.

A former secretary of defense, Panetta will host another former secretary of defense, James Mattis, and former Secretary of State John Kerry. The three former cabinet members will appear together for the 2020 Leon Panetta Lecture Series’ final installment, which will take place on May 18 at the Monterey Conference Center. Also in the lineup for this year are former California governor Jerry Brown and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson.

The first event in the series takes place on Feb. 24 and it features a conversation on impeachment and the election with some of the best-known figures in American media: Bret Baier of Fox News, Mara Liasson of National Public Radio and David Gregory of NBC News.

For Baier, part of the challenge as a journalist covering the election is President Donald Trump’s Twitter behavior. “As I tell my staff, we’re one tweet away from changing our entire show,” Baier says. “The information comes at you fast and furious in this environment. There are six or seven news cycles a day. Depending on where you are ideologically and how you look at the president, you can describe it one way or another. But it definitely keeps us in the media on our toes.”

The overall theme of this year’s series is “A Republic, If We Can Keep It.” The catchy phrase was coined by Benjamin Franklin in 1787 and has been in vogue among both liberals and conservatives. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used the anecdote behind the phrase in a speech last October. The same month, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch released a book with the phrase as its title.

But according to a recent essay in the Washington Post by historian Zara Anishanslin, both Pelosi and Gorsuch – and now the Panetta Institute – misunderstand the phrase’s origin. Anishanslin highlights Elizabeth Willing Powel, “a pivotal woman of the founding era who has been erased from this story.” During the Constitutional Convention, Powel hosted political salons and it was during one of these that she asked Franklin, “What have you given us?” and he responded, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

Anishanslin wrote that Powel’s “erasure not only creates a founding-era political history artificially devoid of women, but it also makes it harder to imagine contemporary women such as Pelosi – or Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – as political leaders.”

Incidentally, this year’s lecture series features mostly white male speakers.