Sean Trende is one of the better conservative political analysts out there. His predictions for 2012 election were off, but he did consider Obama the favorite at least, and he does make logical use of teh math. He’s written a series of articles about how Republicans don’t need to pass immigration reform because (a) the Latino vote is not monolithic and (b) Republicans can flourish by doubling down on the white vote. Ed Kilgore gives a thorough summary of the arguments here.
I don’t agree with his arguments at all, but they’re not nonsense. Sooner or later Republicans were going to come up with reasonably quantitative arguments about why they don’t need immigration reform, and, truthfully, Trende is a cut above the global warming deniers and unskew the polls types.
The only reason Boehner would push immigration reform through the House would be that he’s convinced that the GOP needs its passage to survive. Any reasonably plausibly argument that the GOP doesn’t need its passage after all may be enough to kill the bill.