Amity Shlaes has a column on eliminating the tax deduction for home-mortgage interest: "2012 is also the time when we most need the $100 billion or so from the elimination."
I think the "we" she means here is taxpayers who would benefit from what she calls "the removal of other tax distortions, including excessively high income-tax rates," rather than politicians who would surely love to find a way to spend that $100 billion that is now in the pockets of mortgage-paying homeowners but would otherwise be flowing to Washington in the form of taxes.
It seems to me it is worth doing as part of a broader tax simplification, but not as a thinly disguised tax increase.