You make it sound like the US government is one homogenous voice with one opinion. A republican senator introduced one bill that affects HTTPS, while a completely separate non-legislative government group is advocating for using HTTPS on the sites they control.

>Which is it

It's both, there's two separate groups advocating for two separate things here.

The government being able to use HTTPS on their sites is not logically inconsistent with a requirement that the government be able to get through any encryption.

You are falsely assuming government agencies have a shared set of priorities in common agreement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

There's a pretty significant difference between "no HTTPS" and "mandatory decryption for consumer electronic devices with a warrant", even if the latter is still a bad policy.

The author of the article (in the hn story) I linked claims that the legislation in question bans https

I don't see where the author makes that claim. Mandatory decryption of HTTPS traffic is not a ban on HTTPS.