Supporters of same-sex marriage hope for a boost this week when dozens of high-profile Republicans, many no longer in office, submit their legal argument to the Supreme Court on why gays and lesbians should be allowed to wed, bucking their party's platform in a move that one who had a change of heart on the issue said would “strengthen our nation as a whole.”

More than 80 Republicans are signatories to the "friend of the Court" brief to be filed in the case over Proposition 8, a California law banning same-sex marriage, according to the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which is waging the legal battle against the law. The nation’s high court will hear arguments in the case in late March. The New York Times first reported on the brief.

Credit: Stephen Lam / Reuters file

Meg Whitman, HP's chief executive officer and president, at a meeting on Jan. 16. She says she has had a change of heart on the issue of gay marriage.

One scholar described the effort as “inconceivable” just two years ago, and one of the signers, former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, said in a blog that she had changed her mind on the issue, “like several others who have either sought or held public office, including President Obama.”

“As the Republican nominee for governor of California three years ago, I supported the majority of Californians who voted for Proposition 8 and against same sex marriage,” Whitman, president and chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard Co., said in a separate statement. “After careful review and reflection since then, I have come to embrace civil marriage for same sex couples.”

She noted in her blog that same-sex families “should have equal access to the benefits of marriage” and later added: “Establishing a constitutional right of marriage equality in California will strengthen our nation as a whole.”

Six former governors, including Jon Huntsman of Utah and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, and members of President George W. Bush’s cabinet, such as former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, four former and two current members of Congress signed the brief, AFER said. Members of the Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain presidential campaigns also signed.

The brief will be filed Thursday, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group. Additional names were still being added to it, said AFER, which noted one of its lead attorneys on the case was a conservative, former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, who argued for Bush before the Supreme Court after the disputed 2000 presidential election. 

Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor and author of “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage,” called it an “incredibly important development” and noted the brief could influence Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom he said was the swing vote on gay marriage.

“The fact that more and more Republicans are coming out in favor of gay marriage simply confirms how dramatic the shift in public opinion has been -- and that is a fact that likely is of great significance to Justice Kennedy,” he wrote to NBC News in an email. “Even two years ago, it would have been inconceivable that this many prominent Republicans would have been willing to buck their party platform on the issue.”

In an article last week, former Republican presidential candidate Huntsman wrote that as governor he had backed civil unions but now was supporting marriage for gays and lesbians.

“The party of Lincoln should stand with our best tradition of equality and support full civil marriage for all Americans,” he wrote. “This is both the right thing to do and will better allow us to confront the real choice our country is facing: a choice between the Founders’ vision of a limited government that empowers free markets, with a level playing field giving opportunity to all, and a world of crony capitalism and rent-seeking by the most powerful economic interests.”

Huntsman’s argument echoed parts of the legal brief, which The Times said made the case that allowing same-sex marriage would promote conservative ideals of limited government and individual freedom as well as provide the children of gay couples a two-parent home.

The legal brief was dismissed by the National Organization for Marriage, which on Monday pledged $500,000 to defeat Republican lawmakers supporting any law to allow same-sex marriage in Minnesota, a state considering such legislation.

“None of these people are actively in politics. They are not running for office because they know … supporting same-sex marriage will end your career if you’re a Republican,” said Brian Brown, NOM's president. “There’s overwhelming support for traditional marriage in the Republican party, that’s why it’s part of the party platform, and any attempt by the establishment to redefine marriage and redefine what it means to be a conservative will mean the death of the Republican party.”

But LGBT groups said the brief was further proof of changing attitudes on the issue. Marc Solomon, national campaign director for Freedom to Marry who saw the brief, said the list included Republicans going back to the Reagan administration.

He noted Meg Whitman’s new position represented a “significant shift,” while others who had signed, such as Republican Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York, have also sponsored federal legislation that would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

Steve Schmidt, who worked on the 2004 Bush re-election effort and as chief strategist on McCain’s 2008 presidential bid, has been a “powerful supporter” of same-sex marriage, Solomon said.

“I think most importantly, it’s the broad swath of leaders” on the list, Solomon told NBC News. “We’re no longer just dealing with … one or two ‘mavericks’ who are willing to sort of stick their neck out. …

“This is a big swath of Republicans, of mainstream Republicans, who view the freedom to marry as part of their conservatism rather than something separate from it.”

The Supreme Court will also hear arguments in late March on Section 3 of DOMA, which the Obama administration has encouraged the justices to strike down. In its argument, the federal government noted that Proposition 8 and similar measures in other states was evidence that anti-gay discrimination remained a major problem.

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The automatic spending cuts known as the sequester have ignited a political firestorm in the nation's capital. But if America’s feuding politicos can’t come to an agreement soon, the $1.2 trillion in broad spending cuts will begin March 1, trimming $85 billion a year through 2021. Half of that money would come from the Pentagon and half from non-defense programs, including education and National Parks. Congress has the power to delay, reduce, or cancel the cuts at any time, either before or after they take effect, and programs like Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and student loans will be exempt.

Here’s what you need to know about sequestration as Washington’s gridlock drags us toward spending cuts that Congress passed and Obama signed into law, but that now few lawmakers seem to want.

1. How did we get into this mess?

Sequestration was supposed to be a gun that Congress pointed at itself to force lawmakers to behave and pass a budget. Instead, it’s become just the latest in a seemingly endless series of self-inflicted economic crises that threaten to damage American businesses and undermine credibility with world partners. Sequestration was built into the Budget Control Act of 2011, the bill that brought an end to a bitterly partisan battle over the government’s borrowing power, and included a provision for Congress to develop legislation in time that would have warded off the cuts. The problem with that was Congress failed to pass any such legislation, despite a heated exchange of proposals that went up to the stroke of New Year’s Eve. A bill was passed on January 2 that pushed sequestration back just a little farther – to where we are now.

2. Why call it the sequester?

The term “sequester” is adapted from the legal meaning of the power of a court to seize property, and it came into economic parlance as part of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act of 1985. Most people are familiar with the idea of sequestering a jury during high-publicity court trials, but in this case it refers to the threat of cuts that was supposed to "force Congress to act on further deficit reduction," according to a report on the potential effects of sequestration by the White House Office of Management and Budget. 

3. Who’s responsible?

The key players are President Obama, Speaker of the House John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and wonk lawmakers including Rep. Paul Ryan. They’re the same folks who walked the government into near shutdown in 2011 during the debt-ceiling debacle, squandered America’s AAA credit rating, and held hands to peer over the brink of the fiscal cliff together late last year. Earlier this week, Obama said the idea behind writing the sequester into law in the first place was to get Democrats and Republicans to “find a good compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing tax loopholes.” Republicans have lately been placing all the blame for the pending cuts on the White House, but the measure passed with a majority of Republican votes, and Ryan said at the time that the bill containing the sequester represented “a victory for those committed to controlling government spending and growing our economy.”

4. Will the government shut down?

No. The planned cuts aren't large enough to cripple the federal government. But if they do take place, it will mean that some military deployments may be cancelled, federal agencies and offices like the Transportation Security Administration and Department of Agriculture will reduce services, and some federal employees may be furloughed, asked to involuntarily take off a certain amount of time per week. There may be some alternatives to furloughs, as Jeffrey Zients, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a memo last month. Those could include government hiring freezes, the release of temporary employees, and incentives for existing employees to retire early. But many Americans can lay some of their most basic concerns to rest: Grandma will not see her Social Security check reduced.

5. When would the cuts take place?

The cuts are scheduled to take effect March 1, but they wouldn’t come all at once. For the current fiscal year, the cuts would total $44 billion, which sounds like a ton of money but represents just 1.2 percent of planned federal outlays. Defense contractors likely would be among the individual industries hardest hit by the cuts, but even there layoffs remain “speculative and unforeseeable,” Assistant Secretary of Labor Jane Oates said. But the Pew Center on the States said cuts in discretionary defense spending could cost more than 400,000 jobs over the next 10 years in Florida, Maryland, Texas, California, and Virginia -- the top five states for defense contracting.

6. How are government agencies preparing?

The White House and some federal departments already have started to buckle down to prepare for the eventuality that sequestration will go through. Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon had cancelled deployment of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Harry S Truman to the Middle East. The Navy has said that it would delay repairs to the submarine U.S.S. Miami. But officials have assured defense contractors that standing deals will be honored. Future contracts, however, could be imperiled. Other federal departments may be able to shift some funds around within their department from lower priority activities where funds were not cut to higher priority activities that are hit by the sequester.

7. What may the long-term effects be?

This is where it starts to get really political, because it depends on who you ask. To debt hawks, a force-fed fiscal enema like sequestration may be just the purgative a bloated government needs, and they argue it would be good for the economy in the long run. But outside that circle, the economic consequences don't look so good. The Bipartisan Policy Center says that the American economy may stand to lose 1 million jobs if the full package of cuts goes ahead on schedule. And the Congressional Budget Office noted that the planned cuts will act as a drag on the country’s overall economic growth over the coming fiscal year. The long-term economic ramifications of sequestration may take years to unfold in the lives of ordinary Americans if the cuts go ahead, but for legislators who can't figure out a better way to implement the cuts, the political blowback could come much more swiftly.

8. What can be done to stop it?

With both chambers of Congress on what House leaders call a “District Work Period” this week – also known as a recess – Democrats have called on Republican House leaders to reconvene and strike a deal. Speaker of the House John Boehner has said he’s opposed to the cuts, and has made the case it's up to the White House to break the impasse. Republicans have said they will only agree to a deal to avert the cuts if it includes a plan to cut an equivalent amount of government spending in more orderly fashion. Senate Democrats are backing a plan that includes new revenue generated by closing tax loopholes for the richest Americans. With the clock ticking down, the debate is beginning to resemble the one that set up this manufactured crisis in the first place.

NBC News' Tom Curry contributed to this report.