Obama begins process of picking Supreme Court justice

President Barack Obama this weekend will begin thumbing through resumes for a potential successor to conservative Supreme Court icon Antonin Scalia, aides said on Friday.

The White House said Obama's legal advisors have drawn up biographies of possible justices, along with assorted briefs, opinions and other reading material.

"The president's team, over the course of this week, has spent a lot of time preparing materials for the president's review and I would expect, over the weekend, that the president will begin to dig into the materials," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

"These are materials related to some potential nominees. This would include information about these individuals' record, about their professional career and their professional experience, all of which they would bring to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court."

In the last 24 hours Obama has formally told the Senate's Republican and Democratic leaders that he intends to nominate a replacement to Scalia, who was lying in repose Friday.

In calls to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Obama repeated his publicly stated intention to send a nominee, against their wishes.

Scalia's death last weekend has sparked a monumental election-year fight over the duties of the president and lawmakers under the US Constitution, as well as precedent and politics.

McConnell and Grassley have argued that Obama should leave the appointment of a new justice to his successor, who enters the White House in early 2017, after this November's elections.

"It is today the American people, rather than a lame-duck president whose priorities and policies they just rejected in the most-recent national election, who should be afforded the opportunity to replace Justice Scalia," they wrote in a joint op-ed in the Washington Post.

Obama has pointed to his own duties under the Constitution to name a justice to the bench.

Obama is expected to take around four or five weeks to come up with his candidate.

"The president will consult a wide variety of individuals with a wide variety of perspectives as he contemplates his nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court," said Earnest.