US President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated Neil Gorsuch for a lifetime job on the US Supreme Court, picking the 49-year-old federal appeals court judge to restore the court's conservative majority and help shape rulings on divisive issues such as abortion, gun control, the death penalty and religious rights.

The Colorado native faces a potentially contentious confirmation battle in the US Senate after Republicans last year refused to consider Democratic President Barack Obama's nominee to fill the vacancy caused by the February 2016 death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia.

The Senate's top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, indicated his party would mount a procedural hurdle requiring 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate rather than a simple majority to approve Gorsuch, and expressed “very serious doubts" about the nominee, reports Reuters.

Liberal groups called for an all-out fight to reject Gorsuch while conservative groups and Republican senators heaped praise on him like "outstanding," "impressive" and a "homerun."

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren accused the nominee of siding with large companies over American workers.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called Trump’s

nominee "a very hostile appointment" and "a very bad decision, well outside the mainstream of American legal thought".

Former Democrat presidential contender Bernie Sanders said Judge Gorsuch "must explain his hostility to women's rights, support of corporations over workers and opposition to campaign finance reform".

Announcing the selection to a nighttime crowd in the White House East Room flanked by the judge and his wife, Trump said Gorsuch's resume is “as good as it gets."

"Judge Gorsuch has outstanding legal skills, a brilliant mind, tremendous disciple, and has earned bipartisan support," Trump told an audience that included Scalia’s widow.

Gorsuch is considered a conservative intellectual, known for backing religious rights and writing against euthanasia and assisted suicide, and is seen as very

much in the mold of Scalia, a leading conservative voice on the court for decades.

" I respect... the fact that in our legal order it is for Congress and not the courts to write new laws," Gorsuch said, as Trump looked on. "It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people's representatives. A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge, stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands. ’