Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ron Paul represented Texas's 22nd congressional district from 1976 to 1977 and again from 1979 to 1985, then represented Texas's 14th congressional district from 1997 to 2013. His first entry into the 22nd district came via a 1976 special election after incumbent Robert R. Casey was appointed to the Federal Maritime Commission by President Gerald Ford.
Ron Paul ran for president three times: as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988, and as a candidate for the Republican Party in both 2008 and 2012. In 1988 he received 432,179 votes and appeared on the ballot in 46 states. At both the 2008 and 2012 Republican National Conventions, he received the second-highest delegate count behind the eventual nominee.
Ron Paul has been called the "intellectual godfather" of the Tea Party movement, a fiscally conservative political movement that began in 2007 and gained wide attention in 2009. In 1984, Paul became the first chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the group founded by Charles and David Koch that organized a Tea Party tax protest in 2002 and later split into FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, both central to the Tea Party's rise.
Paul resigned from the Republican Party in 1987 because he concluded that the Reagan administration had produced skyrocketing deficits and a doubled national debt, undermining any claim by Republicans to be the party of limited government. In his resignation letter he asked how a party that controlled the White House and Senate had "accumulated red ink greater than all previous administrations put together." He then sought the 1988 Libertarian Party presidential nomination.
When Rand Paul was elected as a U.S. senator from Kentucky in 2011, Ron Paul became the first U.S. representative in history to serve concurrently with a child in the U.S. Senate.
In the 2016 presidential election, South Texas College political science professor William Greene, a Texas faithless elector pledged to Donald Trump, cast his electoral vote for Paul instead. The vote made Paul, then 81 years old, the oldest person ever to receive an Electoral College vote, and the second Libertarian Party member to receive one after John Hospers in 1972.