Procter had expressed a desire to become a regular character early on. She later commented that it was something of a miscommunication, stating that "If I had in any way known that this was a possibility, I would have stayed there forever! They would've had to kick me out!" Ainsley's character disappeared after the third season, with a reappearance in the seventh season episode "Requiem"; she appeared in a total of twelve episodes. After her time on The West Wing, Procter was quickly picked up for a part on CSI: Miami. Character role On The West Wing, Ainsley Hayes serves as the Associate White House Counsel. She was introduced to the show on a fictional political television program known as Capitol Beat. Despite demeaning comments from those around her, Ainsley gives Sam Seaborn a humiliating defeat in the "spin battle"; the president, Democrat Josiah Bartlet, chooses to hire Ainsley, sensing her intellect and sense of civic duty despite her conservatism. Ainsley had a promising future as a Republican political pundit, but, as she remarked to the White House counsel furious over her hiring, she wanted to "roll up [her] sleeves, set aside partisanship, and say 'what can I do?'" Ainsley is shown to have, as one reviewer put it, a "smart, conservative, principled voice". In "The Lame Duck Congress", Ainsley dresses down Republican staffers who question her viewpoint on a nuclear test ban treaty, with Ainsley countering that they themselves don't necessarily oppose the treaty, but they want to score political points by killing the treaty's ratification. In another episode, when Sam asks Ainsley to summarize a 22-page paper on a commerce amendment in two pages, Ainsley reverses Sam's position and convinces him of her own viewpoint; she also argues with Sam on the Equal Rights Amendment in the second-season episode "17 People", calling it "humiliating" to believe that a law is needed to declare a woman equal to a man. In another episode, Ainsley prevents Sam from disclosing privileged information to force an oil company to pay for a cleanup, which she argued could have gotten him disbarred. Ainsley and Sam also engage in flirtation over the course of the show; for example, in "Bartlet's Third State of the Union", Ainsley asks Sam to dance with her while wearing a robe and playing "Blame It on the Bossa Nova" in her office. The flirtation led Steve Heisler of The