This year began with high hopes for a fix to the nation’s broken immigration system, and the Senate months ago passed a comprehensive reform package that marked a good start. But with only a handful of working days left on the 2013 congressional calendar, there still is no immigration reform. House Speaker John Boehner insists it is “absolutely not dead,” but offers no timetable for votes. If not dead, it is comatose. It may not reawaken next year, either.

Immigration and the rest of the Obama agenda will pay dearly for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s decision Thursday to invoke “the nuclear option” regarding filibusters. Even before that, the disastrous implementation of the Affordable Care Act had so soured Republicans in the House that even the upcoming holiday season of thanks and resurrection is unlikely to put them in a mood to give Obama a major legislative victory on immigration in 2014. And it has so soured the broad public that Obama has no moral or political leverage to push recalcitrant lawmakers of either party.

And then there are the 2014 congressional midterm elections. House members in close races will have little appetite for taking on the hot-button controversy that is built into the immigration debate.

Obama said in 2008 that he would make immigration reform a top priority in his first year. Then it was his first term. Then the first year of his second term. Anyone want to bet on 2015?